Stephen Colbert welcomed the news that Jeff Bezos is stepping down from his position as CEO of Amazon with a blistering segment.
Colbert broached the topic on Tuesday’s episode of his Late Show, hours after it was announced that Amazon will get a new CEO in the third quarter of 2021. Bezos is being replaced by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy, will Bezos will be the executive chairman of the Amazon board.
Colbert riffed on Bezos’s considerable wealth. Bezos is currently the richest person in the world, according to Forbes’s real-time billionaires list, with a net worth of $195.6bn.
“He’s had a really good year,” Colbert said of Bezos, before citing an Oxfam report according to which Bezos “could have personally paid each of Amazon’s 876,000 employees a one-off $105,000 bonus with the wealth he accumulated between March and August 2020 alone, and still be as wealthy as he was at the beginning of the pandemic”.
“Key word here: ‘could have’ given,” Colbert commented, before referring to Bezos as an “obscenely rich plutocrat who hoards wealth”.
The TV host wrapped up the segment with: “In the end, I’m just impressed that the company that delivers my dog food and Nespresso pods had a more peaceful transfer of power than the United States government.”
