Bravo: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laid out a whole lot of home truths about New York City in his CNBC interview Wednesday, exactly the sort of thing more New Yorkers (especially our mayor) need to hear.
His slam of the city Department of Education was epic: “If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it.”
Absolutely: City Hall now burns nearly $45 billion a year on the regular public schools, over $43,000 a student — and as enrollment collapses, it simply spends more per head, without ever showing broad improvement in test scores (except, occasionally, the dumbed-down exams produced by the anti-education State Education Department).
Note that Bezos is not opposed to spending on schools: His family just donated over $100 million for NYC preschools.
The gift comes via the Jackie Bezos Endowment for Early Childhood, named for the billionaire’s late mother — who, he noted on MSNOW, was a teen mom in Albuquerque, NM, who with his adoptive dad (an immigrant from Cuba) wound up launching him on his own road to success.
He pointedly slapped Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s idiotic April 15 “we’re taxing the rich” video outside the home of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin: “That piece of it isn’t right, and there was no reason to do that,” since: “Griffin isn’t a villain. He hasn’t hurt anybody. He’s not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite.”
How’s that? “The way you make $1 billion, or $100 million or $10 million or anything, is you create a service that people love, and if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with a billion dollars.”
More, Bezos dissed politicians’ “technique of picking a villain and pointing fingers,” noting quite rightly that bad government policy creates many problems — including pushing up rents.
Bezos himself pays “billions of dollars in taxes,” and making him pay more would solve nothing: “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.”
In all, it was a fine contrast to the recent timidity of Jamie Dimon and David Solomon, two Wall Street titans who played nice when meeting with the mayor as Mamdani tried to build bridges after his Griffin fiasco.
Hmm: Unlike those two, Bezos’ business has no huge presence in the city (not after progressives derailed Amazon’s bid to build an East Coast headquarters here).
Maybe you need to be a (mostly) out-of-town gazillionaire to call out the disease that’s killing this town.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
