Media Research Center VP of business Dan Gainor — a right-wing apparatchik who once attacked the Muppets for not being sufficiently conservative — is back, and this time his target is Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
In a Sept. 30 NewsBusters post, Gainor rants about the Post publishing articles about income inequality, then attacks Bezos:
According to the Sept. 29, Daily Mail: “But it was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who has emerged as the biggest overall gainer, adding a whopping $16.5 billion to his war chest in a single year after his company posted a quarterly profit in July.”
Whopping indeed. Bezos made 899,521 times the median household income in the United States — $52,250. Were Bezos a nation, the $16.5 billion would give him a GDP rank of 150, just below Kosovo and above 81 nations including Guinea and Iceland.
It seems that Gainor doesn’t understand a very basic financial principle, the difference between income and net worth.
As Forbes points out, that $16.5 billion was created by a increase in the value of his stock in Amazon; he owns 18 percent of the company. Even a first-year business student can tell you that unless Bezos cashes in that stock — which he hasn’t — the rise in its value is not considered income. That makes Gainor’s rant that Bezos “made 899,521 times the median household income in the United States” look foolish.
Gainor doesn’t mention what Bezos actually makes as Amazon CEO — probably because it would make him look even more foolish.
Bloomberg reported that in 2013 Bezos’ Amazon salary was … $81,840. No, really. And he asked the company not to pay him any more than that. He does, however, receive $1.6 million in compensation to cover security arrangements.
We’re pretty sure that even Gainor makes more in salary than Bezos does — indeed, Gainor made more than $122,000 in 2010, a figure we can only assume has increased since then. Given that he can’t grasp basic financial concepts despite being the head of the MRC’s operation targeting business news, he seems overcompensated.