Jeff Bezos and Amazon: the man behind the monster

To be an Amazonian is to dedicate your life to the Bezos rules of management down to the finest details, including never showing any sign of feeling comfortable.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. Picture: AFP

As part of the world’s largest ever divorce settlement, Jeff Bezos had to give his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott 19.7 million shares of Amazon stock worth about $38 billion. But never mind, he was still the richest person on earth, with a post-split personal fortune estimated at $117 billion, which is around $17 billion more than the second richest person, Microsoft’s Bill Gates (now facing a divorce of his own.)

Moreover, within 12 months, Bezos had more than recouped his losses. Two years on, his fortune is up over $260 billion, and he has announced his decision to step down as CEO of Amazon, a company he founded in 1994 with the idea of selling books on this thing called the internet. He’s not walking away because the business is in trouble. On the contrary, its market capitalisation at time of writing was more than $1.7 trillion, making it the biggest online retailer in the world.

The story of Amazon’s rise from humble beginnings is mind-boggling. Amazon accounts for close to 40 per cent of the US online business; it is the largest by far supplier of cloud computing through Amazon Web Services – Amazon’s most profitable business – and it is now also a leading producer of movies and streaming TV series. Amazon Prime, with 200 million subscribers, has revolutionised the way people shop, and destroyed millions of retailers, small and large in America and elsewhere.

Brad Stone, a technology journalist with Bloomberg, published his first book about Amazon, The Everything Store, in 2013. Amazon was then losing money and Jeff Bezos was worth a relatively modest $27 billion. Many analysts thought Amazon was wildly overvalued given its losses, with no clear indication of how and when it would become profitable. Stone’s new book, Amazon Unbound, describes a business empire that is unshackled by regulation, with no apparent limit to its growth, despite moves by the US Congress and European governments to use antitrust laws to rein it in. On one level, this is an ominous story - should one company be allowed such power? But it is also the story of an extraordinary human being who has been at the centre of Amazon’s dizzying growth and its singular ability to remain committed to the sort of entrepreneurial culture, to innovation and invention, that drives technology start-ups but that almost inevitably shrivels when companies mature and become risk averse.

 

Jeff Bezos refused Stone’s requests for an interview and neither did Stone get to interview Bezos family members – his siblings and his parents – but Stone was able to negotiate access to Amazon’s current and past executives and to some Amazon internal company documents. Perhaps the deal was that if he did not pursue Bezos and his family, Stone would be given significant access to key employees?

The result is this deeply researched and well written book about Amazon but also about Jeff Bezos, who emerges as a man of restless energy, sharp intelligence, ruthlessness and inventiveness. At Amazon, among his senior executives, he is said to be ­respected and feared in equal measure. To be an Amazonian is to dedicate your life to the Bezos rules of management down to the finest details and to never show any sign of feeling comfortable or secure no matter how long you have been with the ­company.

According to Stone, Bezos is stepping down as CEO because he is increasingly focused on his private ventures, in particular his space project, Blue Origin, and the Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013 for $250 million. Later this month, Bezos, together with his brother, will be launched into space on a Blue Origin rocket, which Bezos hopes will one day offer tourists a joy ride into space. As well, he seems to be going through a midlife crisis, the details of which are included in this book.

Having divorced MacKenzie Scott after 25 years of marriage, Bezos is now in a long-term relationship with a former minor movie star Lauren Sanchez, with whom he was having an affair when they were both still married, an affair that led to salacious stories in the National Enquirer. Like many a man with a new lover, he has been working out. And of course he has a new wardrobe to go with his new life.

Amazon’s problems cannot be so easily ditched.

The last chapter of Stone’s book details the human cost of the Covid pandemic on the company. One one hand, as Stone writes, “the company had become a salvation of sorts in the year 2020 – a life-preserver, thrown to millions of households around the world, as they quarantined amid the ­relentless assault of the Covid-19 pandemic”. All the world’s people suddenly needed everything, from food to the loo roll, ­delivered. Amazon’s business boomed, and Bezos saw his net worth increase by a staggering 70 per cent, as Americans sheltered in place.

But there is a dark side to this. There had always been a dark side to Amazon’s dazzling success.

By the end of 2020, 1.3 million people were employed by Amazon in giant warehouses across the world. In order to deliver on the promise of next-day delivery for Amazon Prime customers – a promise driven by Bezos – its warehouse workers, refused access to unions and without basic benefits like health care or sick leave, and on minimum wages with no job security, toiled away in vast, often airless buildings.

Also during the pandemic year, some 20,000 Amazon workers contracted Covid-19. There are no figures about how many of them were hospitalised or died. It reminds me of William Blake’s dark satanic mills, from his poem about the industrial revolution in England. Are these Amazon warehouses and their workers fodder for the technological revolution, part the price we all pay for the astounding success of Amazon and Bezos?

Michael Gawenda is a former editor-in-chief of The Age.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and a Global Empire

By Brad Stone

Simon & Schuster, Biography
478pp, $32.99