Politicians want to rein in the retail giant. But Jeff Bezos, the master of cutthroat capitalism, is ready to fight back.
In 2017, a few months after Forbes named Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the world’s richest man, a rumor spread among the company’s executives: Bill Gates, the former wealthiest person on earth, had called Bezos’s assistant to schedule a lunch, asking if Tuesday or Wednesday was available. The assistant informed Bezos of the invitation, and told him that both days were open. Bezos, who had built an empire exhorting employees to be “vocally self-critical,” and to never “believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume,” issued a command: Make it Thursday.
Bezos’s power play was so mild that it likely wasn’t noticed by Gates, but within Amazon the story sparked a small panic (and, later, an official denial). Such a willful act of vanity felt like a bad omen. At Amazon’s headquarters, in Seattle, the company’s fourteen Leadership Principles—painted on walls, posted in bathrooms, printed on laminated cards in executives’ wallets—urge employees to “never say ‘that’s not my job,’ ” to “examine their strongest convictions with humility,” to “not compromise for the sake of social cohesion,” and to commit to excellence even if “people may think these standards are unreasonably high.” (When I recently asked various employees to recite the precepts, they did so with alarming gusto: “ ‘Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!’ ”) A former executive said, “That’s how we earn our success—we’re willing to be frugal and egoless, and obsessed with delighting our customers.”
Amazon is now America’s second-largest private employer. (Walmart is the largest.) It traffics more than a third of all retail products bought or sold online in the U.S.; it owns Whole Foods and helps arrange the shipment of items purchased across the Web, including on eBay and Etsy. Amazon’s Web-services division powers vast portions of the Internet, from Netflix to the C.I.A. You probably contribute to Amazon’s profits whether you intend to or not. Critics say that Amazon, much like Google and Facebook, has grown too large and powerful to be trusted. Everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to President Donald Trump has depicted Amazon as dangerously unconstrained. This past summer, at a debate among the Democratic Presidential candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Five hundred thousand Americans are sleeping out on the street, and yet companies like Amazon, that made billions in profits, did not pay one nickel in federal income tax.” And Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, declared that Amazon has “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.” The Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, meanwhile, are independently pursuing investigations of Amazon for potential antitrust violations. In recent months, inquiries by news organizations have documented Amazon’s sale of illegal or deadly products, and have exposed how the company’s fast-delivery policies have resulted in drivers speeding down streets and through intersections, killing people. Company insiders were accustomed to complaints from rivals at book publishers or executives at big-box stores. Those attacks rarely felt personal. Now, a recently retired Amazon executive told me, “people are worried—we’re suddenly on the firing line.”
Amazon executives were also concerned about dramatic changes within the company. In 2015, Amazon had roughly two hundred thousand employees. Since then, its workforce had nearly tripled. Bezos, now fifty-five, had transformed as well, from a pudgy bookseller with an elephant-seal laugh to a sleek, muscled mogul whose empire included a television-and-movie studio. (Bezos declined to be interviewed for this article.) Amazon executives comforted themselves with the thought that, even if the story about the Bill Gates lunch was true, at least their boss wasn’t reckless, like, say, Elon Musk or Travis Kalanick or Adam Neumann. Many admired Bezos’s dedication to his wife and children, and saw it as an embodiment of the company’s integrity. Still, they whispered, what if his flywheel has gone off track?....MUCH MORE
The notion of the flywheel—the heavy disk within a machine that, once spinning, pushes gears and production relentlessly forward—is venerated within Amazon, as Ian Freed learned on his first day of work, in 2004. Freed had initially glimpsed the power of the Internet as a Harvard student, when he guessed an e-mail address in Indonesia that led him to strike up a correspondence with the country’s minister of telecommunications. After graduating, Freed built computer networks in Russia and drafted policy papers for the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development. He felt that every organization he advised failed to take advantage of all the opportunities created by the Internet. He moved to the West Coast, where he became an expert in streaming networks. Then he joined Amazon, as a director of its fledgling mobile-services team. During an orientation that included a warehouse stint unloading boxes of shampoo and stocking shelves with toothpaste, he realized that people at the company saw things in a fundamentally different way.
Most firms have a mission statement that even the C.E.O. has trouble remembering. Amazon employees, Freed discovered, studied the Leadership Principles like Talmudic texts. During his first few years, he occasionally pulled colleagues, and even Bezos, aside to ask questions. What, for example, does “leaders are right a lot” really mean? Bezos explained, “If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details.” Executives at other companies tended to lay out definitive plans. But Bezos urged his people to be adaptable. “People who are right a lot change their mind,” he once said. “They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re-analyze things all the time, and they come to a new conclusion, and then they change their mind.” Freed often felt an impulse to answer his subordinates’ questions, but at Amazon leaders are encouraged to let team members puzzle out problems on their own.
About a year after joining the company, Freed became Bezos’s technical assistant, which gave him entrĂ©e to almost any meeting and provided a deep education in the company’s culture. Amazon’s internal processes were “mechanisms,” Freed learned, as in “What’s the mechanism for talking to the press?” Executives were expected to reduce “complexifiers,” and someone who failed to suggest ways to simplify a process might be interrupted by Bezos asking, “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”
The Leadership Principles were never paraphrased; when a question over wording arose, the laminated cards were often whipped out. PowerPoint was discouraged. Product proposals had to be written out as six-page narratives—Bezos believed that storytelling forced critical thinking—accompanied by a mock press release. Meetings started with a period of silent reading, and each proposal concluded with a list of F.A.Q.s, such as “What will most disappoint the customer on the first day of release?”
Tech companies are often profligate, but Amazon had an ethic of thrift. Freed learned to anticipate the eye rolls that greeted new employees who printed on just one side of paper, or the admonishment coming to anyone who wanted to book a business-class seat. Whenever Amazon moved to new offices, Bezos had them furnished with cheap desks made from wooden doors. Whereas other tech companies supplied employees with an array of free meals and snacks, Amazon offered only coffee and bananas. (In a statement, Amazon said that it is “frugal on behalf of our customers.”)
