Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

attempts of AMI to escape a cloud of political suspicion. But like the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” which Alexander Hamilton penned in the 1790s, accusing his opponents of extortion when he was confronted with charges of an adulterous affair, the Medium post was a public relations master stroke. Bezos cast himself as a sympathetic defender of the press and an opponent of “AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism.”

De Becker then commissioned an examination of Bezos’s iPhone X. The eventual report by Anthony Ferrante, a longtime colleague of de Becker’s and the former director for cyber incident response for the U.S. National Security Council, concluded that the promotional video about broadband prices that MBS had sent Bezos the previous year likely contained a copy of Pegasus, a piece of nearly invisible malware created by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once the program was activated, Ferrante found, the volume of data leaving Bezos’s smartphone increased by about 3,000 percent.

Following the finalization of his divorce from MacKenzie in July 2019, Bezos’s personal net worth had dropped from $170 billion to $110 billion. Yet such was the buoyancy of Amazon’s stock price that he retained the title of richest person alive and recovered all of that surrendered ground within twelve months. His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.

But Lina Khan, who had helped steer the report as counsel to the subcommittee and whose Yale Law Journal paper on revitalizing antitrust statutes had provided the intellectual foundation for Congress’s investigation, rejected the notion that the proceedings were political. Only thirty-one years old and already one of Amazon’s most credible adversaries, she told me in an interview that Amazon “can dictate terms to everyone dependent on its platform and increasingly enjoys the power to pick winners and losers throughout the economy. When information advantages and bargaining power are so skewed towards a single player that unilaterally sets all the rules, it’s no longer a ‘market’ in any meaningful sense.”

At Amazon, executives were put through rigorous compliance and competition training, where they were instructed how to properly react to various scenarios and avoid the same mistakes that Microsoft made. If they ever heard colleagues talking about setting prices or colluding with partners, for example, they were instructed to “knock over the closest cup of coffee in the room,” stand up, and vocally object, according to Amazonians who recounted details of internal sessions.

Finally, a bipartisan group of lawmakers threatened to subpoena Bezos, citing the Wall Street Journal article that quoted private-label employees on how they used internal data from third-party merchants to launch Amazon-branded products. An Amazon lawyer, Nate Sutton, had previously vowed under oath before the committee that such practices did not occur, so the lawmakers demanded that Bezos address this conduct and the question of whether Sutton had perjured himself. He and the company couldn’t avoid it anymore: for the first time, Bezos would have to testify before Congress.

controlled our political discourse, our financial lives, and the health of countless smaller companies—and that the failure to regulate them was a dangerous abdication of government responsibility.