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

by Brad Stone

“It has always seemed strange to me…. The things we admire in men—kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling—are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest—sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest—are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.” —John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“My life is based on a large series of mistakes,” he said, after an eloquent introduction from his oldest son, nineteen-year-old Preston. “I’m kind of famous for it in the business realm. How many people here have a Fire Phone?” The crowd guffawed and was silent—Amazon’s 2014 smartphone had infamously bombed. “Yeah, no, none of you do. Thanks,” he said to laughs. “Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures,” Bezos continued. “I’m covered in scar tissues as a result of this.” He recalled selecting McCurdy from binders of artists provided by the museum, and said he was looking for “someone who would paint me hyper-realistically, with every flaw, every imperfection, every piece of scar tissue that I have.”

With another like-minded deputy, Andy Jassy, Bezos also expanded in an even more surprising direction. Contemplating the way his own engineers worked, and the expertise the company had developed in building a stable computing infrastructure that could withstand enormous seasonal spikes in traffic, he conceived of a new business called Amazon Web Services. The idea was that Amazon would sell raw computing power to other organizations, who could access it online and use it to economically run their own operations. The business plan was barely understandable to many of Amazon’s own employees and board members. But the forty-year-old Bezos believed in it, micromanaging the project and sending extraordinarily detailed recommendations and goals to AWS team leaders, often late at night. “This has to scale to infinity with no planned downtime,” he told the beleaguered engineers working on the project. “Infinity!” At the same time, Bezos was shocked by Apple’s rapid ascendance in music sales with its iPod music player and iTunes store. Concerned about a similar incursion into books, he initiated a secret project to create Amazon’s own digital book reader, the Kindle. Colleagues thought it was crazy for the perennially money-losing Amazon to make gadgets. “I absolutely know it’s hard, but we’ll learn how to do it,” Bezos told them. He put another deputy, Steve Kessel, in charge and asked him to drop his responsibilities running Amazon’s original bookselling business and to “proceed ...

If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Useful opportunity (patriotic duty) to do my part to deflate this guy who would be a scary prez.

Jeff Bezos was anti Trump

Saving the Post would not only help his friend Don Graham; it would be a significant boon to the American media establishment, as well as a symbolic contribution to the country, and democracy. But his public answer to that question was always much simpler and more earnest: “It’s the most important newspaper in the most important capital city in the Western world. I’d be crazy not to save [it],”

By the opening of the Spheres that January in 2018, forty-five thousand Amazon employees worked in Seattle, and the company occupied about a fifth of all the premium office space in the city. New hotels, restaurants, and construction sprouted in an already dense downtown core. Amazon had altered the quirky character of its hometown, once known as an industrial city and as the source of alternative trends like grunge music and fashion. All of the downsides of twenty-first-century urbanism had accompanied these rapid changes. Historic neighborhoods with rich cultural histories, like the largely Black Central District three miles east of Amazon’s offices, had gentrified at an alarming rate. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle increased by 67 percent between the years of 2013 and 2017, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Traffic on the I-5 freeway into the city, and over the bridges to West Seattle and to the eastern suburbs, crawled to a standstill during rush hour. With restrictive land use regulations and neighborhood opposition limiting the construction of new housing, low-income families were displaced and homelessness on Seattle streets became sickeningly ubiquitous.

That year, Amazon also backed a coalition that proposed a successful $54 billion ballot initiative to expand light rail and other public transit in the region. Bezos was aware of these initiatives, said Amazon employees who worked on them. He supported them, several felt, because they boosted Amazon’s image and required a relatively minor investment of dollars and his own time. He was characteristically focused on the business and largely transactional when discussing community involvement. Internal documents at the company advocated that Amazon do enough to maintain its “social license to operate”—the business concept that refers to the public’s acceptance of a company, its employees, and business practices.

Social license to operate

Back in Seattle, Kshama Sawant and the leftward-careening city council had again proposed a head tax—dubbed the Employee Hours Tax—that would charge large employers up to $500 per employee and raise up to $86 million to counter problems like homelessness and the lack of affordable housing. It was a draconian measure: by comparison, Chicago had a measly $4 per employee head tax for nearly thirty years before mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated that it was responsible for jobs losses and convinced the city council to phase it out. Under the proposal, raised in April 2018, Amazon’s local tax bill would increase by an additional $22.5 million annually, on top of the $250 million in state and local taxes it paid. That would be a fraction of Amazon’s $10 billion profit in 2018, but it was the antagonistic thought that counted. Seattle was moving to double-tax both corporate income and headcount, a situation necessitated in part because Washington is one of seven states with no personal income tax (a fact that had neatly benefited Bezos and other Amazon execs over the years). Amazon believed the company already paid plenty in municipal taxes, and if the city wasn’t spending its money in the right ways and to address the most pressing problems, that was hardly their fault. After the head-tax proposal, Bezos contacted John Schoettler and ordered the real estate division to stop construction on “Block 18,” a seventeen-story tower near Day 1, and to sublease most of the 800,000-square-fo...

On February 27, Lipkin spoke via video to the full S-team. He told Bezos and other senior executives about his recent travels in China and laid out the risks Amazon employees could face. Though it was several weeks before the Trump administration declared a national state of emergency and the epidemiological lexicon officially entered the vocabulary of many Americans, Amazon executives already seemed knowledgeable. They asked him pointed questions about the virus’s incubation period and its R0 or “R naught” potential, the number of people who can be infected by a single individual. Lipkin didn’t recall what Bezos asked, but said, “I remember looking at the guy. He looked pretty fit.”