Jeff Bezos rubbed elbows with Halle Berry, Chris Hemsworth and other Hollywood celebrities at an after-party for the Golden Globes. In December, he walked the red carpet at a screening of “The Post” in Washington.
Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, made public their $33 million donation to a non-profit that provides college scholarships to “Dreamers”, young immigrants brought to the US illegally as children. In October, he received an award for a donation to a marriage equality campaign.
Jennifer Cast, an Amazon executive who solicited the donation from him, said at the event that they could have donated anonymously to the campaign. “But just as critical as the money was Jeff’s offer to let us publicly acknowledge their gifts,” she said. “By allowing us to take their donation public,” she added, “the world quickly knew that Jeff Bezos supported marriage equality.”
The appearances and actions are a new look for Bezos. As he was shaping Amazon into one of the world’s most valuable companies, Bezos developed a reputation as a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan. He preferred to hunker down in Amazon’s hometown, Seattle, at least partly because he thought it was better for Amazon’s growing business, largely avoiding public causes and the black-tie circuit.
But while Bezos — who at 53 is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of more than $100 billion — can afford virtually any luxury, obscurity is no longer among them. Amazon, now a behemoth valued at more than $600 billion, has become one of the faces of “big tech”, along with Apple, Alphabet’s Google and Facebook.
These companies are facing a backlash. Amazon is under the microscope for what critics say is its corrosive effect on jobs and competition, and Bezos has become a bête noire for President Donald Trump, who repeatedly singles out him and Amazon for scorn on Twitter. “People are starting to get scared of Amazon,” said Steve Case, a co-founder of America Online, who recently started an investment fund focused on start-ups in underserved areas, with Bezos among its contributors.
“If Jeff continues to hang out in Seattle, he’s going to get a lot more incoming. Even for just defence reasons, he has to now play offence.”
Bezos’ portfolio of other ventures has thrust him further into the spotlight. Four years ago, he bought “The Washington Post” for $250 million, jump-starting a renaissance of the paper. In 2016, Bezos bought a $23 million home in Washington, one of the city’s most expensive, which is undergoing extensive renovations to make it a suitable party spot for the city’s political class.
Nearby neighbours include former President Barack Obama and his family, and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Bezos’ space start-up, Blue Origin, is also making its efforts more public, giving him another stage. The company is trying to rescue Earth by helping to move pollution-belching heavy industries off the planet.
In a statement, Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, said, “Jeff loves what he is doing, at Amazon, Blue Origin and The Washington Post, and he enjoys sharing his enthusiasm in public as he works with the teams to build and invent.”
But interviews with more than 30 people who know Bezos, most of whom declined to be identified to protect their relationships with him, revealed his awareness of the growing opposition to Amazon and his growing comfort with being in the public eye. Bezos, they said, accepts the probability of greater government scrutiny of Amazon.
The chief executive has advised Amazon executives to conduct themselves so that they can pass any legal or regulatory test. Investor Warren E. Buffett, who has known Bezos since the 1990s, said the cautionary tale of Microsoft, which faced a landmark antitrust case by the government that decade, must loom in Bezos’ mind.
Microsoft, by far the most dominant technology company at the time, lost its footing after the case, opening an unexpected opportunity for competitors. “You’re going to get a lot of scrutiny if you’re disrupting other people’s livelihoods,” Buffett said. Some of the people who know Bezos said his new public face was for business expediency.
Others believe it is a result of personal growth. But they all said it was clear that Bezos and Amazon were trying to go beyond his tech persona to show the world his other sides.
A hedge fund executive in New York who caught the internet bug early, Bezos piled into a vehicle with his wife in 1994 with the intention of finding a place to start a business selling books on the internet. He founded Amazon later that year in Seattle, in part because of the growing pool of technical talent Microsoft had brought to the area.
But putting his start-up in Washington also meant Amazon would not have to collect sales tax in the country’s most populous states, like California, Texas and New York. Retailers typically have an obligation to collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence. For a time, for the same reason, the company would not publicly discuss where most of its warehouses were.
And Amazon employees in Seattle who planned to travel out of state for work had to submit itineraries for review to avoid triggering unwanted sales tax liabilities. Those efforts would, in turn, give his fledgling company a further price advantage against established physical retailers like Barnes & Noble. It also meant that, despite its growing legions of customers, Amazon remained almost invisible in politics.
By the end of 2012, the company had swelled to more than 88,000 employees and over $61 billion in annual sales, creating huge businesses like its Prime membership service and Amazon Web Services along the way. Yet that year the company was criticised by leaders in Seattle and the news media for being disengaged from civic life compared with stalwarts like Boeing and Starbucks.
A turning point came for Bezos around 2011 when Amazon faced a public showdown with US state governments. At the time, legislators began hounding internet retailers like Amazon to collect sales tax. In California, Amazon initially campaigned to overturn a new law imposing an internet sales tax.
But Bezos backed off after it became clear that Amazon’s image could be tarnished, a former employee involved in the matter said. Instead, Amazon began to make peace. In 2011, it signed an agreement with California to collect sales tax in the state, reaching numerous similar agreements around the same time.
As part of those state deals, Amazon began building warehouses across the country, which allowed Amazon to deliver orders more quickly and let local politicians trumpet the arrival of thousands of jobs. Suddenly, a company that once refused to confirm how many employees it had at its Seattle headquarters could not stop talking about how many jobs it was creating.
It now has 542,000 employees.
As Bezos and the company talked about creating jobs, though, he and Amazon faced a counter-narrative from critics that the company was really a job-killing bully. Waves of store closings by bricks-and-mortar retailers like Barnes & Noble and Macy’s increased the volume. “Amazon Must Be Stopped”, read a 2014 “New Republic” article about the company’s growing market power.
That year, a nasty fight over e-book prices with Hachette, the book publisher, solidified Amazon’s reputation for using brass-knuckle tactics. At one point, Amazon slowed delivery times for the publisher’s titles and took other steps to make them less attractive to order. After the matter was resolved, Bezos told an interviewer that Amazon was simply negotiating hard on behalf of its customers.
“It’s very difficult for incumbents who have a sweet thing to accept change,” he said, referring to book publishers.
By late 2015, a few months after Trump announced his campaign for president, he started his Twitter broadsides against Bezos, which often coincided with critical coverage of the candidate in The Washington Post. “The @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives owner @JeffBezos power to screw public on low taxation of @Amazon!” he tweeted in December that year. “Big tax shelter.”
Bezos responded by offering to launch the future president of the US into space on a Blue Origin rocket.
The attention in Washington edged up in June when Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods Markets. Though Amazon remains a niche player in the grocery business, the deal drove home the power of the company and led some lawmakers to question its power. “The purchase of Whole Foods was a moment when people looked up and recognised this company as a force in the economy,” said Stacy Mitchell, a co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Bezos’ more public-facing work was abetted by a management change nearly two years ago at Amazon, when he put Jeff Wilke in charge of its consumer business and Andy Jassy in charge of cloud computing. That freed him up to devote more time to The Post and Blue Origin, though he remains deeply engaged at Amazon, dedicating most of his time to initiatives that are two to four years away from hitting the market.
— New York Times News Service
