Jeff Bezos has achieved global domination, but what’s it all been for?

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest men, but ‘what the hell it has all been for?’ Picture: AFP

People talk of new taxes and new laws, but the only thing that will ever derail Amazon is Amazon. It is big and it gets forever bigger.

Jeff Bezos, founder and (still, just) chief executive, has always been fairly open about this being the plan, too. Back in 2001 he started talking about “flywheel theory”. The idea is that the company is a spinning wheel and everything it does — Alexa, your Kindle, same-day delivery, food, Amazon Web Services etc — adds a little shove, making it spin ever faster. After a while, no other wheel can ever catch up. And anybody who tries to slow it down gets the skin flayed from their hand.

There are those who think that the gyration of the Amazon wheel is growing a little erratic, with a chaotic influx of unvetted Chinese goods and forays into web censorship via its web services. Think of it, perhaps, as Demi Moore’s pottery wheel during the sex scene in Ghost but with dodgy knock-off earphones and regulatory consequences flying off instead of clay.

All of that, though, may not be Bezos’s direct problem. Last week he announced that he is to step down as chief executive, although he will remain chairman of the board. He does so as one of the two richest men in the world. And yet, from his perspective, it’s not facile to ask what the hell it has all been for?

Long before he was anywhere near being the richest man in the world, Bezos was already so rich that money must have ceased to be the motivating factor. Way back in 2004 he bought a ranch in Texas which Brian Dumaine, the author of Bezonomics, describes as “only slightly smaller than Los Angeles”. In 2013 he bought The Washington Post, from which one could infer a desire for civic involvement, although it seems a stretch to suggest that has been his motive all along. But what has?

You could ask this question of any tech billionaire but the difference with Bezos is that with most of the others you could also answer it. For example, the mesmerising Elon Musk, currently ahead of Bezos in the wealth stakes, hit crazy money at the age of 30 with a share of the $US1.5bn that eBay paid for PayPal, and often gives the impression that he’s just been enjoyably messing around ever since. Some of his obsessions (such as SpaceX) become massively successful, while others (hyperloops, submarines) less so.

His current vast, stupid wealth is based on the share price of Tesla, which is worth more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM and Ford put together, despite the former alone last year selling 20 times more cars. Musk smoked cannabis on a podcast in 2018 and tweets with all the restraint of Donald Trump on the loo. He’s a cult figure and having a blast, and he’s also about as unBezos as you get.

Nor, though, is Bezos much like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who latterly resembles a cross between the sorcerer’s apprentice and Doctor Frankenstein, destined to spend the rest of his life trying to undo the damage wrought by his monster. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, seem to see themselves on the cutting edge of humanity’s future, with a health wing and an education wing (which your kids are probably using right now), not to mention their forays into artificial intelligence, virtual reality and driverless cars.

Apple’s Steve Jobs, with impregnable sincerity, believed that making a Macbook close with the right sort of muted click was his gift to the world.

The closest parallel with Bezos would probably be Microsoft’s Bill Gates, but even he put down the reins at 45 to focus on philanthropy.

Now 57, Bezos has arguably had a greater impact than any of them. Even before coronavirus, Amazon was emptying high streets. Today it is the dominant competitor of almost every shop in the Western world. It has pioneered the art of routing vast profits elsewhere, causing panic in treasuries, and it now dominates the backbone of the internet too. In the past few years, it has even been accused of competing with its own sellers, offering in-house rivals to formerly successful lines of speakers, or headphones, or bedding, or pet supplies, or lightbulbs or basically anything at all.

Amazon is relentless and grinding and merciless, but for what? What is the Bezos equivalent of the obsession and passion behind Steve Jobs and the perfect hinge? Of the Zuckerberg terror, or the Google futurism, or the Muskian glee at being rich and bonkers and alive? With Amazon, there’s none of that. Beyond the corporate success, what is the Bezos legacy? That it is now marginally easier to receive an egg whisk on a Saturday morning without going to the supermarket?

Perhaps it is early days. Bezos has his own space firm in the form of the SpaceX rival Blue Origin. He has also recently started giving a few billion to the fight against climate change, as well he should, what with Amazon worldwide having a carbon footprint roughly equivalent to that of Portugal. But you’d struggle to argue that either of those things is what drives him to corner, say, the online coathanger market, or the dumbbell market, all of which Amazon has recently tried to do. He also made a monster and he kept feeding it, even once he must have known it was eating far, far too much. And I wonder, now he has a little more time, if he will spend any of it asking himself why?

The Times