Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  The move heralded a formal changing of the guard at Amazon and the evident end of one of the most epic runs in modern business history. Over the course of two and a half decades, Bezos had taken an idea to sell books on a new medium called the Web, and through invention, the unencumbered embrace of technology, and the ruthless pursuit of leverage, spun it into a global empire worth more than one and a half trillion dollars.

  Few current or former colleagues seemed all that surprised by the news. Bezos had been drifting away gradually for years, spreading his time over his many priorities outside Amazon. They also wondered about his girlfriend, and whether he might be more inclined to a life of extravagant leisure with Lauren Sanchez in their lavish homes and soon, on their grand sailing yacht.

  Bezos had another reason to elevate himself out of the top role: being Amazon CEO was about to get a lot less fun. There were complicated, maturing businesses to oversee, like the Amazon Marketplace, with its bevy of dissatisfied merchants who consistently complained of fraud and unfair competition; and the Amazon fulfillment network, with more than a million blue-collar workers, a vocal portion of them agitating for higher pay and better working conditions. Those parties tended to train their ire on Amazon’s top executive and to hold him personally responsible for problems. Related regulatory challenges also loomed in Washington and Brussels. With Jassy, fifty-three, Bezos was anointing a disciplined leader he had meticulously trained in his unusual way of managing, who performed well in the spotlight and presented a somewhat humbler target for Amazon’s political opponents. His former technical advisor had amply proven himself by building and running the most profitable part of Amazon, and had the bandwidth for an increasingly engrossing job.

  “Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else,” Bezos wrote in an email to employees. “As Exec Chair, I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, the Washington Post, and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring.”

  Jeff Bezos’s mission had been to stave off stasis and to keep Amazon a “Day 1” company with an inventive culture and durable customs that would outlast him. “Amazon is not too big to fail,” he once warned employees at an all-hands meeting. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”

  It would now largely fall to Andy Jassy to prevent that dark possibility. Among the new CEO’s greatest challenges will be retaining the company’s deep bench of experienced senior leaders, even if Amazon’s stock price stagnates; keeping the ever-growing warehouse workforce motivated and happy; and navigating the impending regulatory scrutiny inside and outside the U.S. That climactic battle, which might one day culminate in an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon by the U.S. government, was still largely ahead.

  But with its fourteen sacrosanct leadership principles, interlocking business units, and overwhelming momentum, Bezos had seemingly set up Jassy and the company to flourish well after he stepped aside. In this respect, his life’s work, at Amazon at least, was arguably done.

  Still looming, of course, was a definitive answer to a perennial question that even now is almost impossible to resolve: Is the world better off with Amazon in it?

  Or perhaps, in the wake of Amazon’s evolution into a trillion-dollar empire and Jeff Bezos’s graduation into the annals of business history, it simply no longer makes sense to ask. The company is now woven inextricably into our lives and communities, hooking customers on the convenience of ordering from home and posing insurmountable challenges for all but the nimblest local retailers. It calls to mind Bezos’s old saying about one-way and two-way doors, and “type one” irreversible decisions. Long ago, we stepped through a one-way door and into the technological society conceived of and built in large part by Jeff Bezos and his colleagues. Whatever you think about the company—and the man—that controls so much of our economic reality in the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is no turning back now.

  After Jeff Bezos quit his high-paying job on Wall Street, he launched his seemingly modest business, an online bookstore, in July 1995. The company’s first warehouse was in its office basement. Jim Lott/Seattle Times

  Thirty-five-year-old Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie at home in Seattle in 1999. Amazon’s market cap hit $25 billion that fall, and he was named Time’s “Person of the Year,” right before the internet economy crashed and Amazon barely survived the fallout. David Burnett/Contact Press Images

  As a child, Bezos’s parents sent him every summer to the Cotulla, Texas, ranch of his retired grandfather, where he learned the value of self-reliance and developed a love for science fiction and space. He revisited the family ranch in 1999. David Burnett/Contact Press Images

  Jeff Bezos wanted Amazon to create a totally unique smartphone. The Fire phone, which he conceived in 2010 and closely managed, could present the illusion of a 3D image on its screen. But Amazon’s engineers were skeptical of its appeal, and the phone bombed after its introduction in June 2014. David Ryder/Getty Images

  When Amazon India executives presented a conservative growth plan, Bezos told them, “I don’t need computer scientists in India. I need cowboys.” He rewarded their resulting ambition with a visit in September 2014, unveiling an oversize $2 billion investment check atop a decorated flatbed truck. Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

  Bezos wanted legendary executive editor Marty Baron involved in his strategy meetings with Washington Post executives. “If you are going to change the restaurant, the chef has got to be on board,” he said. They spoke onstage in May 2016.

  Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief, was unjustly convicted of espionage and imprisoned in Iran for eighteen months. Upon his release in January 2016, Bezos took his personal jet to Frankfurt to return the journalist and his family back to the United States. Alex Wong/Getty Images

  Bezos’s fascination with Hollywood and Star Trek converged with his cameo in the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond. He attended the premiere with then-wife MacKenzie and their four kids. Todd Williamson/Getty Images

  Roy Price, the first head of Amazon Studios, greenlit critical hits like Transparent, helping launch Amazon—and Bezos—in Hollywood. He was a mainstay at Amazon parties, including at this one after the Emmys in September 2016. Price resigned the following year after allegations of inappropriate behavior. Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Amazon Studios

  Hollywood gravitated toward Amazon’s billionaire founder and vice versa. At Amazon’s Golden Globes party at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in January 2018, Bezos partied with A-listers Matt Damon, Taika Waititi, and Chris Hemsworth. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

  Worldwide Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke championed the more humane elements of Amazon’s hard-edged culture. “He is simply one of those people without whom Amazon would be completely unrecognizable,” Bezos wrote when Wilke announced his departure in 2020. Joe Buglewicz/Bloomberg

  Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy lobbied to conceal the stellar financial performance of his division, which now accounts for more than 60 percent of Amazon’s operating profits, for as long as possible. In 2021, Bezos announced Jassy would succeed him as CEO of all of Amazon. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

  Beth Galetti, the only woman on the executive S-team for more than three years, took over Amazon HR shortly after a devastating article about the company’s culture appeared in the New York Times in 2015. She was asked to “radically simplify” its performance review system. Holly Andres

  Dave Clark has run Amazon’s vast operations division since 2012. He spearheaded the acquisition of robot firm Kiva and the expansion into delivering packages, amid criticism of Amazon’s safety record. He replaced Jeff Wilke as consumer CEO in 2021. Kyle Johnson
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  During his presidency, Donald Trump railed against Amazon, accusing it of tax avoidance and defrauding the U.S. Postal Service. In June 2017, Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and other tech leaders made a largely peaceful pilgrimage to the White House. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

  In July 2017, Bezos attended the exclusive Allen & Company Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. A widely circulated photo revealed the CEO’s heightened workout regimen, spawned countless internet memes, and popularized the phrase “swole Bezos.” Drew Angerer/Getty Images

  In November 2015, Blue Origin launched and landed both a crew capsule and its reusable booster rocket, a historic feat. “Welcome to the club,” Bezos tweeted at Elon Musk when SpaceX did it one month later. But Blue’s advantage wouldn’t last. Blue Origin/ZUMA Press

  After the National Enquirer made their relationship public, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started moving openly through elite society. In February 2020, they attended a fashion show in Los Angeles with Jennifer Lopez and legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Calla Kessler/The New York Times/Redux

  Bezos returned to India in January 2020 for a much different visit than the one in 2014. This time, small merchants protested the CEO’s arrival, while Bezos and Lauren Sanchez dressed up and took a photo in front of the Taj Mahal. PAWAN SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images

  By the January 2018 opening of The Spheres, three interlinked glass conservatories at its headquarters in Seattle, Amazon occupied a fifth of all premium office space in the city and relations with the progressive city council were frosty. Jack Young – Places/Alamy

  Vociferous opposition greeted Amazon’s decision to locate half of its second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, New York. Protesters unfurled anti-Amazon banners and jeered at an HQ2 city council hearing in January 2019. Amazon cancelled its plans to build new offices there only days later. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

  At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, criticism flooded in from Amazon’s hourly workforce. Despite instituting temperature checks, social distancing guidelines, and other safety measures, some employees were still getting sick and workers protested that the company was prioritizing sales over safety. Leandro Justen

  After it resisted making Bezos available to testify before Congress, Amazon was forced to relent. On July 29, 2020, the CEO appeared virtually, along with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook, during the House Judiciary Subcommittee’s hearing on online platforms and market power. Mandel Ngan

  “My life is based on a large series of mistakes,” Bezos said in November 2019 at the Smithsonian’s American Portrait Gala in Washington D.C. He was introduced by his oldest son, Preston. Joy Asico/AP for National Portrait Gallery

  Bezos sorted through binders of artists before choosing the photorealistic painter Robert McCurdy. He was looking for “someone who would paint me hyper-realistically, with every flaw, every imperfection, every piece of scar tissue that I have.”

  Acknowledgments

  I started reporting this book in early 2018 and wrote it over the course of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like so many other things during that challenging time, successfully completing it was only possible with the support and wisdom of friends, family, and colleagues to whom I am deeply indebted.

  At Simon & Schuster, Stephanie Frerich was a graceful editor who never shied away from asking difficult questions, rearranging clunky prose, and keeping the larger narrative from veering off course. She made the book immeasurably better. Emily Simonson, Elisa Rivlin, Jackie Seow, Matthew Monahan, Samantha Hoback, and Lisa Erwin helped to get it across the finish line during an accelerated publication schedule. Jonathan Karp, Dana Canedy, Richard Rhorer, Kimberly Goldstein, Stephen Bedford, Marie Florio, Larry Hughes, and the late Carolyn Reidy were believers in this book and proponents of an unrestrained examination of its powerful subject.

  My agent, Pilar Queen at UTA, was a relentless advocate and advisor. She patiently urged me to return to the rapidly evolving topic of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, then became an avid champion and an early reader. I owe her many thanks.

  Lindsay Gellman provided valuable research assistance, in addition to fact-checking help alongside the meticulous and fast-working team of Lindsay Muscato, Rima Parikh, and Jeremy Gantz. Diana Suryakusuma assisted with photographs. All errors are solely my own. Thanks also to Chris Oster and Halle Gordon at Amazon for facilitating multiple interviews and herding innumerable facts.

  At Bloomberg News, I’m grateful to John Micklethwait, Reto Gregori, and Heather Harris, who were enthusiastic backers of this project and indulgent of my periodic retreat from our daily work. I’m enormously proud to be part of Bloomberg’s Global Technology team; Tom Giles, Jillian Ward, Mark Milian, Peter Elstrom, Edwin Chan, Giles Turner, Molly Schuetz, Alistair Barr, and Andy Martin are tremendous partners who lead a group of sixty-five talented technology journalists around the world. Joel Weber, Kristin Powers, and Jim Aley at Bloomberg Businessweek were steadfast allies; Max Chafkin offered plenty of sound counsel and dark humor during the writing process.

  My Bloomberg colleagues Mark Gurman, Austin Carr, Ellen Huet, Josh Brustein, Dina Bass, Priya Anand, Ian King, Nico Grant, Kartikay Mehrotra, Anne Vandermey, Naomi Nix, Tom Metcalf, Jack Witzig, Brody Ford, and Devon Pendleton all answered my periodic pleas for assistance. Sarah Frier and Emily Chang were always ready with motivation and encouragement. Saritha Rai helped me unravel the story of Amazon in India, and Chapter 3 is based in part on a cover story we jointly wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek. Ashlee Vance was an unfaltering friend and co-conspirator.

  I owe special thanks to Bloomberg reporters Spencer Soper and Matt Day and editor Robin Ajello, whose work is heavily endnoted in these pages. They provided indispensable feedback and a reservoir of deep knowledge about Amazon. Together we’re working on an audio version of Amazon’s story, as part of Bloomberg Technology’s podcast series, Foundering, produced by Shawn Wen. Please keep an eye out for it.

  Anne Kornblut, Matt Mosk, Adam Piore, Sean Meshorer, Ethan Watters, Michael Jordan, Fred Sharples, Ruzwana Bashir, Adam Rogers, Daniel McGinn, and Charles Duhigg all offered friendship and assistance at various moments of need. Nick and Chrysta Bilton generously hosted me on several trips to Los Angeles; Nick and Emily Wingfield offered the same hospitality in Seattle. Steven Levy has provided wise counsel and invaluable friendship over many years.

  I’m extremely fortunate to have a large and supportive family, including my brothers, Brian Stone and Eric Stone, Dita Papraniku Stone and Becca Zoller Stone, Luanne Stone, Maté Schissler and Andrew Iorgulescu, and Jon and Monica Stone. My father, Robert Stone, is my closest reader and was a sounding board for the ideas in this book; my mother, Carol Glick, offered unconditional love, advice, and the appropriate level of concern over the magnitude of the undertaking. My grandmother, Bernice Yaspan, remains an avid reader at 103 years old, and one of my personal goals was to place this volume in her hands.

  My daughters, Isabella Stone, Calista Stone, and Harper Fox, make me exceedingly proud every day. Set against their resilience during the pandemic, writing another book seemed relatively easy. But of course, it wouldn’t have been remotely possible without the love, patience, and infinite encouragement of my wife, Tiffany Fox.

  More from the Author

  Gearheads

  About the Author

  © DAVID PAUL MORRIS

  Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

  SimonandSchuster.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Brad-Stone

  @simonbooks

  ALSO BY BRAD STONE

  The Upstarts

  The Everything Store

  Gearheads


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  Endnotes

  INTRODUCTION

  No concrete way existed to achieve this goal: Matt Day, “Amazon Tries to Make the Climate Its Prime Directive,” Bloomberg, September 21, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-21/amazon-made-a-climate-promise-without-a-plan-to-cut-emissions (January 16, 2021).

  “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice”: Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors,” Medium, April 10, 2019, https://amazonemployees4climatejustice.medium.com/public-letter-to-jeff-bezos-and-the-amazon-board-of-directors-82a8405f5e38 (January 18, 2021).

  the grudge-holding CEO hid an acronym, milliravi: “Meaningful Innovation Leads, Launches, Inspires Relentless Amazon Visitor Improvements” was the basis for the acronym milliravi, a word that an Amazon executive coined to mean “a significant mathematical error of a million dollars or more.” See Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2013), 135.