Amazon, the great job-creator!

I may not like Amazon, but I do order plenty of stuff off their site. Yes, I always (mostly always) try to get what I want locally, in a brick & mortar. Or directly through the vendor. But sometimes you just gotta do what you just gotta do. And I have to admit, it's great when that little smiley package lands on the doorstep the very next day. 

And Amazon is a job creator. It has over 1.6M employees. Plus the small businesses that have expanded the market for their wares thanks to Amazon. Of course, it's also a destroyer of jobs, and there are some studies that maintain that it has destroyed more jobs than it's created, leveling local retailers all over the place. Is Amazon a net job creator? Maybe yes, maybe no.

But Bezos is responsible for creating at least one oddball job, one fellow has struck gold in the Amazon.

He looks like a billion bucks.

A German ex-electrician went from watts to wealth after quitting his gig and becoming a professional Jeff Bezos lookalike.

Now, much like his celebrity doppelgänger, he lives a lavish lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

“I look like his twin brother,” Cagdas Halicilar, 46, told Jam Press of his uncanny resemblance to the Amazon founder, who is the world’s second-richest person with just over a cool $201 billion dollars. (Source: NY Post)

Halicilar does have another source of income. A while ago, he had swapped out being an electrician for running his own transport company. But who couldn't use a side hustle? So a while back, he signed up with a "doppelgänger agency." (Imagine such a thing.)

Moonlighting as Bezos part-time has allowed the mogul impersonator to land some eye-popping opportunities, including various gigs on German TV stations and at events.

The shiny bald head obviously helps, but Halicilar does look an awful lot like Bezos. On a trip to Seattle, he strolled around the Amazon campus and was asked for a selfie by a number of employees who thought he was the big mahoff. Many of them also took the opportunity for a bit of suck-up, telling the faux Bezos how proud they were to work for Amazon. Turns out that effort was a misdirected waste of breath.

Some folks who've asked for selfies have been so tongue-tied and shy in the presence of Bezonian greatness they've been rendered speechless. I guess they communicate with the universal language of holding up their phone and raising their eyebrows in an 'ask' that they wanted a selfie.

Between his transort business and his side gig, Halicilar is living pretty large. Not Bezos large, of course. Not bunch of $90M homes large. Not personal space flight large. Not invitest to state dinners at the White House. But large enough to hire a butler, drink top shelf whisky, and travel in style. 

He even did a guest spot on the German Netflix mini-series “King of Stonks.”

Never heard of "Stonks." Probably because it's a German thing. I'll have to look it up and may even decide to binge it.

But whether it's Bezos of Halicilar, I doubt if I spot him on the street I'd ask for a selfie. Too busy trying to think of what I'd say to John Roberts if I ever saw him out and about - and it sure wouldn't be asking him for a selfie. But that's another story altogether...