Yet he largely keeps his intentions to himself many longtime colleagues can’t recall him ever expressing a political opinion. What exactly does Jeff Bezos want? Or, to put it slightly differently, what does he believe? Given his power over the world, these are not small questions. “We have to go to space to save Earth,” he says.īezos’s ventures are by now so large and varied that it is difficult to truly comprehend the nature of his empire, much less the end point of his ambitions. Bezos worries that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. Over the course of just this past year, Amazon has announced the following endeavors: It will match potential home buyers with real-estate agents and integrate their new homes with Amazon devices it will enable its voice assistant, Alexa, to access health-care data, such as the status of a prescription or a blood-sugar reading it will build a 3-million-square-foot cargo airport outside Cincinnati it will make next-day delivery standard for members of its Prime service it will start a new chain of grocery stores, in addition to Whole Foods, which it already owns it will stream Major League Baseball games it will launch more than 3,000 satellites into orbit to supply the world with high-speed internet. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance. Since that time, Bezos’s reach has only grown. In 2014, I wrote a cover story for The New Republic with a pugilistic title: “ Amazon Must Be Stopped.” Citing my article, the company subsequently terminated an advertising campaign for its political comedy, Alpha House, that had been running in the magazine. Amazon delayed shipments of Hachette books when consumers searched for some Hachette titles, it redirected them to similar books from other publishers. When the conglomerate Hachette, with which I’d once published a book, refused to accede to Amazon’s demands, it was punished.
I felt anxious about how the company bullied the book business, extracting ever more favorable terms from the publishers that had come to depend on it. I first grew concerned about Amazon’s power five years ago. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry-institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system.
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To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Īt 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith.