This article is a complete mess from top to bottom and the author is literally doing the sham accounting from the brain teaser that he (erroneously) attributes to Bezos.

I could go at length about everything wrong with it, but I'll take aim at one particular analogy he uses: the artist's painting.

> Bezos claims that Amazon made $21 billion in net income for the year, and counts that as value created for shareholders. [...] If you spend $50 on art supplies and turn them into a painting worth $500, you have created $450 worth of value. And when you sell the painting, you end up with net $450 that you didn’t have before, because that’s the difference in values between what you consumed and what you produced.

What!? No! Literally just before this paragraph is a passage claiming Amazon values its employees' time at $0. Now the author himself literally does this: in the story, the artist's labor is entirely unaccounted for. Where did the labor that produced the painting come from? Is it worth literally nothing? Did magical faeries come in the night and produce it?

In reality, we have "opportunity costs": what we give up in order to get things we want. When we trade our labor, we give up not only the labor itself, but also the alternative uses of our time, namely leisure or maybe labor that is more enjoyable. The most valuable thing (subjectively to us) we give up is the "opportunity cost" of our labor. Certainly the artist's leisure is worth more than $0.

> In this way, the amount of money you made is equal to the value you produced (we are assuming, like good little capitalists, that markets are efficient and that externalities don’t exist and all that).

Externalities? Dafuq? Is this "art" an ugly billboard or something? Maybe the paint is quite pungent and makes the artist's roommates angry? Is the author just cargo culting from an anti-capitalist word bank without any clue about what the words mean? I think so.

> But the value you created isn’t the money. The money already existed and was floating around the economy long before you picked up the brush.

Oh, Christ, money supply is not the same as currency in circulation. We have M1 and M2, for instance. This "money" is more than just dollar bills, but includes checking accounts, savings accounts, even things like CDs.

> The value you created was in the art, which is now in someone else’s hands. So while Amazon shareholders may be $21 billion richer than they were before, it’s not meaningful to say that value was created “for the shareholders”. It doesn’t matter whom value was created for— the shareholders would be the ones getting rich regardless.

Okay, let's use an analogy that properly maps to what Amazon is doing. Let's consider someone who commissions an artist to produce an artwork which the commissioner intends to sell. The "total value" produced for the commissioner (using the admittedly obnoxious "profit in dollars" meaning above) would be the sale price of the art less the cost of supplies and the compensation for the artist. But this is literally how Amazon is using the meaning here!

What value did the commissioner get? Well, he tied up his money in art supplies and an artist, and took the risk that he'd never get any of it back. Moreover, if we change this scenario back into the version the author himself presented, where the artist and commissioner are the same person, then the artist captures all of the value less cost of supplies. Isn't this exactly what Bezos is doing?

I think it would be a much richer conversation to question whether the sainted Amazon Shareholders or the Archangel Bezos himself are engaging in much risk-taking these days, or just exploiting monopoly profits and political connections for returns beyond a risk-adjusted level, and whether this allows Amazon to give labor and "human capital" short shrift, but alas, this seems to elude our author. Regardless, shareholders are tying up their money in something illiquid, and so should be compensated at least a little bit for their trouble.

The rest of the article is just as incoherent, sloppy and tendentious as this excerpt. And while the author is correct to criticize the concept of value as invoked by Bezos (and finance people in general), he accepts it for the sake of argument early on. So even the lone valid criticism is muddled and involves goalpost shifting.