Jeff Bezos has come under fire for reminiscing about his first job at McDonald’s in a tweet with photo of himself eating a burger at the fast food chain.
“My first job. And still the same great burger. Happy Sunday!” the Amazon founder - who is the second richest person in the world with a net worth estimated at $154bn - tweeted on Sunday.
Mr Bezos previously recounted how he started working at McDonald’s when he was 16 in 1980 to Cody Teets for her book Golden Opportunity: Remarkable Careers That Began at McDonald’s.
“I was a grill man and never worked the cash registers. The most challenging thing was keeping everything going at the right pace during a rush,” he said.
“The manager at my McDonald’s was excellent. He had a lot of teenagers working for him, and he kept us focused even while we had fun.”
But Mr Bezos’ Twitter trip down memory lane was not well received by many users, who accused him of being “fake working class”.
“Jeff Bezos can end world hunger for 15 years and still be the 76th richest person on Earth,” Rafael Shimunov wrote in response to the Amazon chairman’s tweet.
“They don’t just want to f*** the working class. They also want fake being working class while f***ing the working class. Jeff Bezos’s parents gave him $300K to start Amazon and becomes the world’s richest worker exploiter. Today’s equivalent is $600,000,” he added.
“I had no idea that Jeff Bezos’ first job was union busting McDonald’s,” Maura Quint wrote.
“You’d think wealth would afford someone the opportunity to eat decent food,” one Twitter user said.
Another critic noted how Mr Bezos was criticized earlier this year for following reports that he would be paying for a century-old bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to be dismantled so that his new megayacht could get out of the shipyard where it’s under construction.
The yacht was towed to another shipyard, with the bridge remaining in place, earlier this month where it’s being completed.
“Don’t forget this man tried to get the Dutch government to dismantle a historic bridge so he could navigate his $500M megayacht. Go kick rocks with the common man schtick, Jeffrey,” the critic said.
Another user, João Zamith, tweeted: “Theory: if things we can easily have leave us feeling unsatisfied, it stands to reason that what truly drives billionaires is social validation not from peers (it comes with the territory) but from the masses. They will destroy the world because they can never be cool.”
“We should be concerned that the most ‘successful’ examples of capitalistic achievement seem to desperately want their humanity back and nothing they try works at all,” another critic added.
“You have maggots crawling around in your brain if you seriously believe any rich person came from nothing,” yet another concluded.
