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  To my father, Robert Stone

  “His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention. Dozens of researchers and engineers and developmental tinkerers labored beneath Edison in a carefully constructed hierarchical organization that he founded and oversaw.”

  —Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night: A Novel

  “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

  Introduction

  It was the kind of large indoor gathering that would soon feel anachronistic, like an ancient custom from a lost civilization. On a Sunday night in November 2019, one month before Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, China, kicking off the worst pandemic in modern history, luminaries from the worlds of politics, media, business, and the arts gathered at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and hundreds of other guests packed the museum courtyard for an invitation-only, black-tie affair. They were there to celebrate the addition of six new portraits to the gallery’s permanent collection, honoring iconic Americans such as Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, as well as the richest person in the world: Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos.

  Bezos’s lifelike portrait by the photorealistic painter Robert McCurdy depicted him against a stark white background, wearing a crisp white shirt, silver tie, and the severe gaze that had flustered Amazon employees over the last twenty-five years. In his speech that night, accepting the Portrait of a Nation Prize for commitment to “service, creativity, individuality, insight, and ingenuity,” Bezos thanked his large coterie of family and colleagues in the audience and struck a characteristic note of public humility.

  “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.”

  The audience responded to Bezos’s speech with a rapturous standing ovation. It was that kind of evening. The band Earth, Wind & Fire played, guests drank and danced, and the comedian James Corden presented an award to Wintour while impersonating her in a blond wig, black sunglasses, and fur-lined coat. “Ask Jeff Bezos to get me a coffee!” he vamped. The well-heeled crowd roared in delight.

  Outside that prosperous gathering though, the feelings toward Amazon and its CEO in the midst of the company’s twenty-sixth year were far more complicated. Amazon was booming, but its name was stained. Wherever there was applause, there was also discordant criticism. Amazon was admired and even beloved by customers while its secretive intentions were often mistrusted, and the towering net worth of its founder, set against the plight of its blue-collar workforce in company warehouses, provoked unsettling questions about the asymmetric distribution of money and power. Amazon was no longer just an inspiring business story but a referendum on society, and on the responsibilities that large companies have toward their employees, their communities, and the sanctity of our fragile planet.

  Bezos had attempted to address that latter concern by conceiving the Climate Pledge, a promise that Amazon would be carbon neutral by 2040, ten years before the most ambitious goals set by the Paris climate accords. Critics were hammering Amazon to follow other companies and reveal its carbon footprint—its contribution to the harmful gasses that were rapidly warming the globe. Its sustainability division had labored for years to create more efficient standards for its buildings and to cut down on wasteful packaging materials. But it wasn’t enough to simply publicize their work and follow other companies by releasing a carbon impact report. Bezos insisted that Amazon approach the issue creatively, so that it might be viewed as a leader and its millions of customers around the world could still feel good about visiting the site and clicking the buttons labeled “Buy Now.”

  No concrete way existed to achieve this goal, particularly in the face of Amazon’s growing armada of pollution-spewing airplanes, trucks, and delivery vans. Nevertheless, Bezos wanted to unveil the pledge and invite other companies to sign it with a grand gesture. One idea actively discussed inside the company was for him to announce the initiative with a video that he would personally record from one of the polar ice caps. Employees in Amazon’s sustainability and public relations departments actually spent a few days contemplating how to pull off that nightmarishly complex and carbon-intensive feat, until they mercifully gave up the notion. Bezos would do it in the far more accessible and warmer confines of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

  On the morning of September 19, 2019, two months before the gala at the Smithsonian, a few dozen members of the press gathered for a rare audience with Amazon’s CEO. Bezos sat on a small stage with Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Predictions made by climate scientists just five years ago are turning out to be wrong,” he began. “The Antarctic ice sheets are melting 70 percent faster than predicted five years ago. Oceans are warming 40 percent faster.” To help meet its new goals, he continued, Amazon would move to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy. It would start by placing an order for one hundred thousand electric vans from the Plymouth, Michigan–based startup that Amazon had helped fund, Rivian Automotive.

  In the Q&A session that followed, a reporter asked Bezos about a group of workers who had banded together under the mantle “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.” They were demanding, among other things, that the company withdraw financial support for climate-denying politicians and break its cloud computing contracts with fossil fuel companies. “I think it’s totally understandable,” said Bezos of the group’s concerns, while noting that he didn’t agree with all of their demands. “We don’t want this to be the tragedy of the commons. We all have to work together on this.” A few months later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon would fire two of the group’s organizers.

  I was in the audience that day as well, and raised my hand to ask Bezos the last question of the morning: Was he confident that humanity could move quickly enough to escape the direst scenarios for a warming planet? “I’m congenitally optimistic,” he replied, fixing me with the laser-eyed stare that the artist Robert McCurdy so faithfully captured. “I really do believe when ingenuity gets involved, when invention gets involved, when peo
ple get determined, when passion comes out, when they make strong goals—you can invent your way out of any box. That’s what we humans need to do right now. I believe we’re going to do it. I’m sure we’re going to do it.”

  His answer suggested total faith in the underlying virtues of technology, and in the ability of the cleverest, most determined innovators to navigate out of any jam. At least in that moment, he seemed like the same old Jeff, and not at all the billionaire who founded and operated a business that, depending on your perspective, was either propelling the world into an exciting future or helping to blot out the nurturing sun of fair competition and free enterprise itself.

  * * *

  Today, Amazon sells nearly everything and delivers its packages promptly, powers much of the internet in its data centers, streams television shows and movies to our homes, and sells a popular line of voice-activated speakers. But nearly three decades ago, it was just an idea, circulating on the fortieth floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. In case you’re not familiar with that foundational piece of internet lore, the story went like this:

  Vowing upon the age of thirty to risk the entrepreneurial path, Jeffrey Preston Bezos quit his high-paying job at the esteemed Wall Street hedge fund D. E. Shaw to start a seemingly modest business: an online bookstore. With his twenty-four-year-old wife, MacKenzie, he flew from New York City to Fort Worth, took his family’s ’88 Chevy Blazer out of storage, and asked her to drive northwest while he sat in the passenger’s seat, tapping financial projections into a spreadsheet on his laptop. It was 1994, the paleolithic year of the internet.

  He set up his startup in the enclosed garage of a three-bedroom ranch house in an eastern Seattle suburb, with an old iron potbellied stove at its center, and fashioned the first two desks himself out of sixty-dollar wooden doors from Home Depot. He called the company Cadabra Inc., then wavered and considered the names Bookmall.com, Aard.com, and Relentless.com, before finally deducing that the Earth’s largest river could represent its biggest selection of books—Amazon.com.

  He financed the startup himself at first, along with a $245,000 investment from his devoted parents, Jackie and Mike. When the website went live in ’95, Amazon immediately got caught up in a dawning mania for a novel technology called the World Wide Web. There was 30, 40, 50 percent growth in orders each week, undermining any attempts at careful planning and pushing that earliest batch of eclectic recruits into such a frenetic pace that they would later share a palpable sense of amnesia about those early times. The first potential investors mostly balked, distrustful of the internet and this geeky, self-assured young man from the East Coast with a crazy, barking laugh. But in 1996, Silicon Valley venture capitalists got ahold of the startup, and the abundance of money flipped a switch in the brain of the budding CEO, sparking a bullish fervor of wild ambitions and fever dreams of domination.

  The first company-wide motto was “Get Big Fast.” Amazon’s rapid expansion, during what became known as the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, was epic. Bezos hired new executives, opened new warehouses, staged a well-publicized IPO in 1997, and fought off a desperate lawsuit from his first rival, the bookseller Barnes & Noble. He thought the Amazon brand could be malleable, like Richard Branson’s Virgin, so he dove headlong into new product categories and started selling CDs, DVDs, toys, and electronics. “We are going to take this thing to the moon,” he told then fellow Seattle CEO Howard Schultz of Starbucks.

  Bezos wanted to set his own metrics for success, without interference from impatient outsiders, so he encoded his operating philosophy in his first letter to shareholders, vowing a focus not on immediate financial returns or on satisfying the myopic demands of Wall Street, but on increasing cash flow and growing market share to generate value over the long term for loyal shareholders. “This is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com,” he wrote, coining the sacred phrase “Day 1” that inside Amazon would come to represent the need for constant invention, fast decision-making, and the eager embrace of broader technology trends. Investors signed on for the ride, bidding the stock price to unimaginable heights. The CEO became a millionaire and a celebrity, landing on the cover of Time magazine as “Person of the Year” in 1999, at the twilight of the century, his balding head peeking goofily out of a cardboard box filled with colored Styrofoam peanuts.

  But behind the scenes, things were a mess. Amazon’s profligate investments in other dot-com startups were souring, a host of acquisitions hadn’t worked, and many of the early hires, from traditional retailers like Walmart, looked askance at the sprawling chaos and fled. The first warehouses were so overwhelmed by orders over the Christmas holidays that employees from Seattle had to leave their desks every December, roll up their sleeves, and work on the front lines, packing and wrapping gifts while doubling up in economy hotel rooms.

  Over the next two years, the company bled money and almost died during the period known as the dot-com bust. A financial paper dubbed the company “Amazon.bomb”—declaring that “Investors Are Beginning to Realize This Storybook Stock Has Problems”—and it stuck. Bezos was widely ridiculed and in 2001 was even frivolously investigated by the SEC for insider trading. One analyst generated frequent headlines by repeatedly predicting that the company was about to run out of money. By then, Amazon had moved into a 1930s-era art deco VA hospital that sat on a hill facing downtown Seattle. When the Nisqually earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest in February 2001, bricks and mortar rained down in what seemed like an ominous prophecy. Bezos and his employees survived by diving under their thick door desks.

  Amazon’s stock sank into the single digits, ruining dreams of quick fortune. The thirty-seven-year-old Bezos scrawled “I am not my stock price!” on a whiteboard in his office and doubled down on giveaways to customers, like rapid delivery of the latest Harry Potter novel on the day of publication.

  Employees were scared, but Bezos seemed to have ice in his veins. Through some well-timed debt offerings and a last-minute $100 million infusion from the online service AOL in the summer of 2001, the company raised enough money to cover its obligations and evade the fate that befell most other dot-coms. When Amazon finally cut enough costs to notch a quarter of profitability in the spring of 2003, the grudge-holding CEO hid an acronym, milliravi, in an earnings press release, an inside joke ridiculing the analyst who had predicted Amazon’s demise.

  The company had survived, but there was little about it that seemed special. The rival online store eBay had a far larger selection of products for sale. The discount physical retailer Walmart had lower prices. The growing search engine Google was attracting the world’s best engineers and siphoning away online shoppers to its eponymous website, then charging Amazon to place advertisements within search results to lure them back.

  What followed was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history. After failing to match eBay’s success with online auctions, Bezos opened the site to third-party sellers and allowed them to list their wares alongside Amazon’s own products and let customers decide who to buy from. Then he had an epiphany, recognizing the flywheel, or virtuous cycle, that was powering his business. By adding outside vendors and additional selection to Amazon.com, the company drew in new shoppers and earned commissions on those sales, which it could use to lower prices or subsidize faster delivery. That in turn drew in more shoppers and attracted more sellers—and the process repeated itself. Invest in any part of the loop, Bezos reasoned, and this cycle would accelerate.

  Bezos also hired an executive named Jeff Wilke from the aerospace and automotive giant AlliedSignal. Wilke was a lot like Bezos: precocious, ambitious, and focused on satisfying customers over just about everything else, including the feelings of his employees. Together they redesigned the warehouses, christening them “fulfillment centers” or FCs, and rewrote their logistics software from scratch. The ability to efficiently and predictably fulfill customer orders allowed Amazon to resume expansion into new product categories, like jewelry
and apparel—and eventually, to introduce the enticing $79-a-year two-day shipping guarantee, Amazon Prime.

  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 as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” The resulting skirmishes with traditional publishers over the terms for the new e-book market spanned years and generated charges that Amazon was engaging in predatory conduct. Paradoxically, it also resulted in an antitrust case against five large book publishers and Apple, alleging they had illegally conspired to fix digital prices for e-books above the Kindle’s $9.99 standard.