Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?

Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.

Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?

Kind of but it was moreso that he wanted to invest in expansion and R&D while driving prices down for consumers

See: Dodge vs Ford

Fascinating read especially when viewed from the strategic angling to make Ford less profitable and cut off the minority shareholders the Dodge brothers from the dividend revenue stream they were using to build a rival company. So ironically, while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits, he would have realized greater shareholder profits by stifling the competition in its crib.

> while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.

The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).

The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).

“Paying people more money makes them more efficient, motivated, and productive which benefits the company more than it costs. The expansion investment is to grow even faster to bring even more profits over the long term”.

Done. I doubt Henry Ford had trouble coming up with a fig leaf explanation if that’s all that was truly needed.