Jeff Bezos: On To The Stars

Jeff Bezos: On To The Stars

By William Jones and D. S. Mitchell

 

A Gifted Child

A gifted child born to a teen mom, Bezos grew up never knowing his biological father. Reportedly the father was a top-rated unicyclist and circus performer. Jeff’s mother soon married a Cuban immigrant who had fled the Communist revolution. Miguel Bezos had his life shattered when his elite private Jesuit school was closed and his family’s lumberyard seized.

Passion And Struggle

When Jeff Bezos first started an online book shop in his garage in 1994, even he would have struggled to envision the sheer size and impact of Amazon today. With the internet still in its infancy, Bezos’ foresight on all things digital, combined with his passion for retail, enabled him to devise a revolutionary model for how consumers would one day purchase their goods. Fast forward 27 years, and Amazon has the infrastructure and the know-how to capitalize on an e-commerce market that continues to sky-rocket in popularity and profit.

Jeff Defined E-commerce

Bezos ran the mammoth technology corporation across three decades. Under his leadership, Amazon has become a dominant force in online retail, cloud hosting, media production, and artificial intelligence. Bezos helped define e-commerce as we know it and made ordering from Amazon the default for millions of shoppers locked in through the Prime subscription service. But his true master-stroke may be Amazon Web Services, a computing and cloud storage service that millions of companies now turn to. Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

Permeated

Journalists have speculated whether Bezos’ near-pathological competitiveness is a product of his early abandonment, similar to that of fellow tech overlord Steve Jobs. No doubt equally formative to a young boy was Bezos’ adoptive father and his view of the world. In fact, during an interview Jeff Bezos told  Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, that their home life was “permeated” by complaints about totalitarian governments of both the Right and the Left.

Poor Working Conditions and Monopolistic Practices

While Bezos’ stewardship of the company can be seen as a heroic mission to give everyday shoppers low-cost access to any item under the sun, his ethos has contributed to poor working conditions and harmful monopolistic practices. By 2011, Amazon’s workplace culture was toxic. A negative series of headline-grabbing reports defined Amazon workers as poorly paid, ceaselessly surveilled, and overworked. Reportedly, the company ruthlessly pushed employees to maintain a breakneck pace, to such an extent that both physical and emotional well-being was jeopardized.

Debate, Criticize, and Disagree

Bezos created a culture in which everyone from the lowest peon to the highest-ranking executive is expected to match his devotion. This approach has resulted in spectacular levels of staff turnover. A declared enemy of “social cohesion,” Bezos pushed his underlings to reject compromise and instead fiercely debate and criticize colleagues when they disagreed. One former employee described it as ​“purposeful Darwinism.” Known for withering put-downs — “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” ​”Did I take my stupid pills today?”—Bezos also isn’t above pulling out his phone or, in some cases, simply leaving the room when an employee fails to impress.

A “Professional Dater”

The flipside of Bezos’ intellect is a cold, clinical approach to human relations. Bezos described himself as a “professional dater” during his Wall Street days, trying to improve what he called his “women flow” — a riff on the Wall Street term “deal flow.”

Martian To Bully

“He was not warm,” one person who knew Bezos during his Wall Street days told the East Bay Express. ​”It was like he could be a Martian for all I knew.” Bezos’ pitiless leadership style bled out beyond the Amazon boardroom as he used the company’s growing market share to bully book publishers into his terms. The company launched the ​”Gazelle Project”—as in, go after publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle” — allowing Amazon to undercut its competition at the cost of little to no profit for smaller publishers.

 Transparently Political 

As Amazon inched closer to Bezos’ original vision, it began lobbying efforts in 2000. It became more transparently political by 2011, spending millions to defeat an internet sales tax and playing hardball with state governments, threatening to shutter Amazon facilities if its wishes went unfulfilled. In 2013, Amazon began lobbying Congress to cut corporate taxes.

Words vs Intent

The same year, Bezos bought the Washington Post, invested in Business Insider, and donated to the libertarian magazine Reason. Though Bezos argues his purchase of the Post was motivated by ​”a love affair with the printed word” and a desire to support American democracy, others suspect Bezos’ interest in media is related to the bad press following a scathing Lehman Brothers report in 2000, which sent Amazon’s stock price tumbling.

Libertarian Politics

Leading up to the Post-purchase, Bezos was increasingly displaying what early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer called his ​”libertarian politics.” In addition to spending $100,000 in 2010 on a campaign to defeat a proposed Washington state tax on high-income earners, Bezos put hundreds of thousands of dollars toward boosting charter schools and other neoliberal education reforms.

Bezos’ Hates Progressive Candidates

Bezos’ political involvement reached a new apogee in 2019 during the re-election bid of Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, who called Bezos ​”our enemy” and tried to pass a head tax to fund housing for those displaced by Amazon’s Seattle footprint. Amazon spent $1.5 million against Sawant and other progressive candidates, a record at the local level, with more than a dozen of the company’s executives contributing to Sawant’s opponent. (Sawant won re-election anyway.)

Trekkie Billionaire

As for Bezos’ endgame? A Trekkie since childhood, he has long dreamed of funding space exploration, a mission pursued by other superrich moguls (such as Elon Musk) in the face of the climate emergency. Opening the doors of his secretive Blue Origin aerospace company to journalists for the first time in 2016, Bezos told the New York Times he envisioned a future of ​”millions of people living and working in space,” exploiting the natural resources of surrounding planets and rezoning Earth ​”as light industrial and residential.”

Ironically. . .

Ironically, as Bezos pours the wealth he’s wrung out of thousands of exhausted, low-wage Amazon workers into his passion for space exploration; Amazon is busy hastening the very planetary collapse Bezos claims he’s trying to prevent — by silencing workers who speak out against Amazon’s alliance to oil and gas companies.

Conclusion

Bezos’ career is a testament to the cruel autocracy and senseless misallocation of resources that our neoliberal capitalist system enables. But his opulence also reveals that the wealth exists to build a fairer and more equitable society — if redistributed. Bezos may loathe social cohesion, but in a world organized around democracy rather than the whims of space-billionaires, it’s something we may well be able to achieve.

References

https://hbr.org/2013/10/what-its-like-to-work-for-jeff-bezos-hint-hell-probably-call-you-stupid

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Bezos