This week on GrokTALK, a quick look at wealth and value as I compare what Elon Musk and KeffBezos have done in exchange for their enormous wealth and what the whiny liberal bitches in Government have done in exchange for theirs.
00:00 Introduction and Fundraising Announcement
00:46 Critique of Government and Wealth Redistribution
02:38 The Economic Impact of Jeff Bezos and Amazon
10:44 Elon Musk’s Job Creation and Technological Advancements
16:06 The Dangers of Socialism and Government Control
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the Embedded Video does not load.
Edited Transcript:
Welcome back for another edition of GrokTALK! brought to you by GraniteGrok.com and Grok Media LLC. Welcome to the program. I want to remind you that throughout the month of July, if you donate to GraniteGrok.com, you can get free copies of books by Ian Underwood.
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So today I was inspired by an X post.
From Rob Allen.
I have to give politicians some credit. They’ve done a masterful job of directly stealing your money and manage to redirect your ire to the rich. Elon, Bezos, et al. Do not send men with guns to my house if I don’t pay my taxes. The government does that. And yet you’ve been trained like a barking seal to hate them for the actions of the people you’ve voted for. Credit where credit is due. It’s absolutely Machiavellian.
So that’s a fair statement. We’ve been saying for many, many years that one of the major differences between job creators and job destroyers, that being people who build, invest, and create things in the private sector, and people who take money from those people to wreck their competitors in some cases, and in most cases just defraud the American people.
Companies don’t have armies, they don’t have a National Guard, they don’t have federal agencies with armed agents who can go under the cover of law and take stuff. Companies can’t do that. They have to do something, even if it’s pay off politicians, to stay in business.
They have to sell something, create something, inspire something. They do not make any money to pay their employees unless they’ve got something that you’re willing to spend your money on. Now, sure, there are a lot of political motivations to create and secure monopolies. That’s what government is, however. So keep that in mind. So after reading that statement, I thought, well, geez, you know, I should do a little research, see if I could find
Just how many jobs did Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk create? And I’ll be honest with you, it’s pretty damn impressive. So we’ll start with Bezos, Amazon.com. It’s been around for a while now; it’s ubiquitous, really.
So, you know, what’s this rich bastard Jeff Bezos done for anybody else besides himself? I mean, he’s a billionaire. Well, ⁓ geez, I mean, Amazon employs roughly 1.56 to 1.58 million full- and part-time workers worldwide. 1.1 million of those are in the United States. So about 70% of all the jobs Amazon has created for Amazon are in America.
Amazon also has a very interesting effect on local economies, as is the case with all sorts of private investment. I mean, if you invest in an operation and people decide that they want your product or service, you’re gonna create jobs because people are voluntarily exchanging a portion of what they earn legally in the world, and sometimes Illegally, on your product or service. And then you take that money, and you invest it in your company, and you invest it in workers to do the work for you because at some point, even if you start out as just you, you need to hire other people to help you do the thing, especially if it is desired and useful.
So in 2025, the U.S. Economic Impact Report will be one million indirect jobs created because Amazon exists in construction, logistics, suppliers, and related industries. So now Amazon has credit for two and a half million jobs, over two million of them in the United States.
It also reports investing more than $340 billion in the US in 2025 in infrastructure and compensation, with cumulative contributions to the US economy exceeding $1.8 trillion since 2010. Amazon positions itself as one of the largest job creators in the US over the past decade, and it continues to grow because it does something people want or need. And remember, voluntarily,
No one is forcing them to pay for things; no one is forcing them to do anything. They don’t have to shop at Amazon.com, they don’t have to subscribe to Amazon Prime, and they don’t have to use Amazon’s web services. They provide a service, and people choose to use it. Competitors are allowed to do a better job, and when they do, those people who were at Amazon may go somewhere else.
Local job multiplier effects studies on Amazon fulfillment centers show a positive local multiplier effect of roughly 1.9 to 2. So for every 10 direct American jobs that Amazon creates, it also creates nine additional jobs in other businesses or companies that are not Amazon.com, suppliers, firms, service, retail, et cetera.
One analysis found that a typical mid-sized county with an Amazon investment gained forty-four hundred more jobs overall than similar counties without, take that, Sandy Cortez, who kicked Amazon out of New York.
An Oxford Economics analysis found that, on average, five years later, as many as 6,000 small businesses were formed as a result of Amazon being wherever it is that Amazon is. So you’re talking about 10,000 additional workers who joined the local workforce. Unemployment dropped
By 12,000 workers on average. Gains also included higher wages, labor force participation, and reduced reliance on programs paid for by taxpayers like Medicaid. So Mr. Bezos’ little experiment not only creates jobs for the company that he started, it creates jobs in companies that benefit from its existence, and it reduces the taxpayer burden to pay for things they no longer have to pay for.
These effects stem from direct hiring, demand for local suppliers and services, construction activity, and employee spending in the community. He creates wealth that people spend in restaurants, bars, and retail outlets, which then, thanks to the increased commerce, hire more people and create more wealth and more opportunity.
Jobs enabled at other US companies, for example, sure, lots of companies benefit from the existence of Amazon as a thing. And so their relationship with it creates revenue growth for them because they sell things on the platform, meaning they need more employees to handle the increased volume.
Third-party sellers on the Amazon marketplace, mostly small and medium-sized U.S. businesses, have over 60% of their sales from the Amazon store, which comes from independent sellers. These sellers have generated more than 2.5 trillion in sales in 25 years. They now employ more than two million people in the U.S. to support their Amazon-related operations. An 11% year-over-year increase. Many use fulfillment by Amazon for logistics in rural and small-town areas, and small-town sellers have seen particularly strong growth, meaning your tiny little business in the middle of nowhere can grow rapidly just by using Amazon, which wouldn’t exist without Jeff Bezos. Delivery service partners, independent owner-operators, thousands of them across the U.S., who run last-mile delivery businesses and employ drivers.
One reference notes: 210,000 driving jobs tied to this program.
Suppliers and vendors, companies providing packaging, technology, equipment, and services to Amazon operations, including fulfillment, transportation, data centers, et cetera, all have created jobs to service Amazon’s need for these materials and these services. Construction and infrastructure firms building and maintaining fulfillment centers, warehouses, and data centers. Amazon Web Services customers, countless U.S. companies, startups, enterprises, and nonprofits, use AWS cloud infrastructure to operate and grow with lower upfront IT costs. This indirectly supports jobs across tech, finance, healthcare, retail, and more; those specific job counts are difficult to calculate. Local service providers, restaurants, retailers, healthcare, and other businesses that benefit from increased economic activity and employee spending near Amazon facilities all benefit as well.
Amazon’s platform effectively lowers barriers for small businesses to access national and international customers using efficient logistics and enabling job creation at those businesses. In other words, Jeff Bezos creates millions of jobs, generates trillions in wealth for private people, investors, folks like you and me, just because he had this idea about how things could be done differently in the world of logistics.
Elon Musk, slightly different, obviously now the super richest man in the world, the world’s first trillionaire.
His direct employment is slightly smaller. His companies employ roughly 152,000 to 160,000 people globally. Tesla, of course, which is incredibly well-known among them, has about 126,000 employees, although that number’s probably gone up in recent years. SpaceX, Starlink, estimated 12 to 22,000.
In places like Hawthorne, California, Starbase Boca Chica, Texas, Florida Space Coast, and Vandenberg in California. X, formerly Twitter, is the one example where we went the other direction; they had about seventy-five hundred to eight thousand before he acquired it, and now they have probably fewer than three thousand, maybe as few as eighteen hundred, but they didn’t need them. It’s more efficient now.
Musk’s smaller companies, XAI, Neuralink, Boring, hundreds each of jobs, So Tesla dominates the headcount.
The benefits of all these companies are that, because they’re technology companies and they’re advancing technologies, improving technologies, they are driving STEM-related jobs. You’re talking about engineering that, for example, makes a massive rocket a lot easier and more compact, but they don’t build all those parts. So you have, just like with Amazon, you have all the secondary business, all the engineering, all the technology, all the, you know, from rocket fuel to parts to battery construction to, you know, tire manufacture to everything. All those companies benefit from the innovations that have come from Elon Musk and the people he hires to run these companies for him. He has created lots and lots of jobs.
And of course, the growth and wealth of his company, the people who have been with him and invested in it, are becoming wealthy as well. Again, all of their own choice, all in the free market. Nobody brought a gun to their head or threatened to, as the government would, and said, You have to invest in this; you have to spend your money on this. This is what you’re going to do with your time and labor. These are free people doing things with their own minds, their own mouths, their own dollars, and their own labor to create.
Create things that are useful to not just individuals, but industries, nations, and things people want. And so that is why when you listen to the Sandy Cortez’s and the Bernie Sanderses, who live entirely on envy, because they don’t create anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. They do create some things; they create debt, lots of it.
Lots of spending. By the way, there’s a ton more we could go into here on all the growth opportunities and the secondary and tertiary benefits of private investment and intellectual capital, which Mr. Musk has made possible, most of it here in America.
The government takes other people’s money. It can’t do anything without first depriving somebody else of something they did, some labor they exerted, some idea they had, and they can just steal it because that’s how government works. Now, any job they create with that money cannot exist unless somebody else first creates something of value that they can then pilfer for their own purposes.
⁓ and once you create that job, there’s a great deal of reluctance to get rid of it, like what happened at X Twitter. They had lots of jobs; they were just paying people, and he was like, We can do this with fewer people and use those resources for something else, something more productive. Government doesn’t work that way. The government creates unproductive jobs and then reinforces them by creating more.
Almost always in the interests of government or the people in charge of it. There’s lots of fraud.
Tons of fraud. We’ve seen in the last few months alone. The fraud investigations have revealed billions and trillions of dollars in fraud. Money taken from you by the threat of force and given to somebody else who then didn’t deserve it because they cheated the system. A system the government runs, a system the government is supposed to police. So, a couple of notes I wrote.
Fraud has been proven to be not just a problem, but a huge problem. Instead of investigating it and stopping it to save those dollars, Democrats in particular appear more interested in protecting the fraud and the fraudsters. Ironically, fraud in the private sector usually results in the collapse of the business after a fraud-riddled government has investigated it, which it might choose not to do if the government or its actors benefit from the fraud, be it in the public or private sector.
So while it’s accurate to say that people like Elon and Jeff have created lots of jobs and more than a few millionaires, government makes people rich all the time by stealing taxpayer money to finance NGOs and projects that enrich friends and family whose job it is to ensure the problem never gets better or gets worse to justify their budgets getting bigger and expanding at your expense. And then there’s debt.
While Elon and Jeff have created millions of jobs as a result of things people want or need, government has created nearly forty trillion dollars of debt that will need to be paid with interest by people who have not yet been born, who never voted for it, and have yet to earn their first dime. Finally, let’s talk about socialism, since that’s been popping its ugly little red head up out of the ground, especially in New York City. Democrat socialism exists to create socialism. Socialism exists to create communism. Communism is a system by which you own nothing, including your own life, not just your labors, not just things you may have as possessions, but your actual existence. And it’s only permitted because the government allows you to. Now imagine.
They talk about no more cops, no more borders, and letting the prisoners out of jail. Well, what are they gonna do? Well, they’re gonna steal from you, they’re going to kill you, they’re going to advance their own lifestyles at your expense, which is exactly what communism is. But here’s the problem: you can’t have communism without a police state.
You can’t say we don’t want cops or you don’t want prisons, because the minute you take control of everything, including people.
Human nature tells us that they might want to complain about that. They might not think it’s fair. And who says more about fairness than Democrat socialists? It’s so unfair. The system is so unfair. We have these trillionaires and billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who have created real value on personal choice, not force.
And that’s supposedly somehow sinister and evil. And their cure is to take control of everything, including you and your property, and that will be fair. No. People don’t like that. They don’t get along very well that way. And so they will want to complain. But you can’t complain. Because they’ve probably taken all your guns and you have nothing to defend yourself with. So you are not only a victim of criminals, you are a victim of your government, which will do whatever they want to you, and what are you gonna do about it? Look at Iran. Those people, they need to rise up and find all the Republican Guard officers, and they need to imprison them and jail them. But they have all the weapons. So the civilians are sort of stuck. And that doesn’t just happen overnight. But it can.
If you elect the wrong people, if you believe in the wrong politicians and allow them to form the wrong sort of government, they will take your rights away faster than you can say class warfare. So whether you believe communism or socialism is bad or not, do you work for nothing? No, nobody does that.
Would you work for nothing? Nope.
Would you invest in anything knowing you would get nothing back?
Would you create for nothing?
What makes you think anyone else would?
And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. The government will tell you you are doing it for the party, the people, or your country. But you’re not getting anything back in exchange. Unless tyranny counts, unless suppression of your rights counts, unless incarceration counts. Because the minute you decide you don’t want to do that anymore for whatever pittance you get in return from the government, because that sort of government can’t create wealth, it can only destroy it, meaning there will be less and less for the same number of people until they find a way around that problem, which, interestingly enough, could be assisted suicide. It doesn’t end well. It never ends well.
Every example in history ends badly because human beings, human nature. The system can’t succeed because of people. Human nature prohibits it. Doesn’t matter how much you think it works on paper. In practice, it always ends the same way.
And we know it’s bad. Some Democrats are saying, I’m not a socialist. I’m not a Democrat socialist. I don’t want communism or socialism or blah blah blah blah blah, which is total and utter bullshit because they do. They’re pretending to be the moderate voice in an environment where no moderate will ever have a voice. The radicals always run the train, and this is no different.
So interesting tweet.
They have done a masterful job of directly stealing your money Elon Bezos et al. do not send men with guns to my house. If I don’t pay my taxes, the government does. And yet you’ve been trained, like a barking seal, to hate them for the actions of the people you voted for.
That’s it. Rich people?
Now, I’ll be fair, there are rich people out there who inherited their wealth, and many of them are bastards. Quite often, left-wing, pro-Democrat, socialist bastards. Because they didn’t earn it. Bernie Sanders never earned a thing. He never worked a real job. He used the government to bilk taxpayers to enrich himself.
Donald Trump was already rich when he became president. He isn’t using the government to make himself richer.
That would be what the Democrats do. And they hate him for it because he doesn’t need them. And ultimately, that’s the problem. It’s not that they hate the wealth that Elon and Jeff create. They need it because their system requires other people’s stuff to sustain itself until it inevitably collapses, which it will. But
They will be the people who become the oligarchs. The very people that they’re saying you should hate are the ones they need most to make sure that their political power is sustained for as long as possible. And while it won’t be Elon and Jeff, it will be somebody similar who will be put in charge of that sector of your new Democrat socialist economy until it’s run into the ground.
That’s pretty much it for today, I think. Thanks for listening.
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