0:01

I want to thank every

0:03

Amazon employee and every Amazon

0:05

customer because you guys paid

0:07

progress. You guys paid

0:10

probles. This

0:12

is Megacorp, an investigative podcast

0:15

exposing some of the world's most unethical

0:18

corporations. This series

0:20

is about Amazon. I'm

0:23

Jake Hanrahan, journalists and

0:25

documentary filmmaker. Megacorp

0:29

is produced by H eleven for

0:31

Cool Zone Media.

0:38

So after eight episodes now

0:41

diving into the many scandals

0:43

at the heart of Amazon, I

0:45

thought it was time to talk about the man

0:47

who built the empire, Jeff

0:49

Bezos. As we know, Bezos

0:52

is the richest man on Earth. He

0:54

founded Amazon in and

0:58

now it's one of the biggest company k needs

1:00

on the planet. Is also, as

1:02

we've discovered, one of the most controversial.

1:05

But how did Bezos get to this point?

1:08

But if there's anyone that knows that, it's journalist

1:11

Robert Evans. He runs the Behind

1:13

the Bastards podcast, which looks

1:15

into the lives of some of the worst bastards

1:18

on Earth. So I spoke

1:21

to Robert Evans about Jeff

1:23

Bezos. Robert goes into

1:25

a lot of detail in this so

1:28

mostly I'm just gonna let the interview

1:30

run first.

1:33

Maybe if you can just kind of go

1:35

into the early life of Jeff Bezos,

1:38

because he didn't start out as Jeff Bezos.

1:41

Yeah, he was born Jeffrey Preston Jourgensen

1:44

um. And one of the things that is

1:46

I think the first and most amazing thing about

1:49

the Jeff Bezos story is that his

1:51

his actual father abandoned

1:53

the family. And this is not this

1:55

is not like your normal story of a dude

1:57

winding up without a dad, where like it

2:00

there's there's something like really unsettling or

2:02

or dark here. It's that his

2:04

his actual father is bio dad um.

2:07

Theodore Jourgensen was just

2:09

like kind of a uh, kind

2:11

of a ship head carney

2:13

who really really really loved

2:15

unicycling. He was a high wire unicyclist

2:18

um, and having a kid got in the way

2:20

of his unicycling dreams. Yes, you

2:22

did hear that right, Jeff Bezos. His biological

2:25

father abandoned him when

2:27

he was young to fulfill a dream

2:29

of his as a high wire unicyclist.

2:32

Now, it's not funny when

2:34

somebody abandons the family, but what a

2:37

strange start that is. Anyway,

2:39

Robot explains more, he could not get

2:41

on board with being Jeffrey's

2:44

father and eventually kind of bounced

2:46

the funk out of his life and in fact

2:48

did not know that his son

2:50

was Jeff Bezos and who Jeff

2:53

Bezos was really until a

2:55

journalist tracked him down like decades

2:57

later when Amazon was a huge deal and was like,

3:00

you know, your kids like super rich in

3:02

creating what's turning into this monster company.

3:04

He was very surprised. Um, and

3:06

I think is still kind of a deadbeat unicyclist

3:08

dude. So Jeff by the time he

3:11

was pretty young, Um,

3:13

his mom had met a a new

3:15

dude, UM

3:18

whose name was Miguel Angel

3:21

Bezos Perez, who was a Cuban

3:23

who kind of his version

3:25

of the story. And I don't know about much about

3:27

his family back in Cuba or kind

3:29

of like where they stood and whatnot.

3:32

But he was apparently as a teenager

3:34

like painting anti Castro graffiti,

3:37

which got him in trouble and at age sixteen he

3:39

had to flee the country. Um,

3:41

and so he wound up in the United States. Uh.

3:43

He did his undergrad work at the University of Albuquerque,

3:46

So he wound up in because Bezos comes

3:48

from the Southwest, right, That's where his his family's like

3:50

a lot in New Mexico because his

3:52

mom's side of the family were really heavily

3:54

involved in um, the US nuclear

3:57

programs and like nuclear missiles and and all

3:59

that, all that and stuff. Um

4:01

and Miguel wound up in the same region because

4:03

the University of Albuquerque was offering free

4:05

scholarships to Cuban refugees, and

4:07

so he met Jeffrey's mom,

4:10

Jacqueline Um, when he

4:12

was working as a clerk at a bank that she

4:14

worked at two and they fell in love and married

4:16

and I think before jeff really, I

4:18

don't think jeff really remembers much time before mcguel,

4:20

because Miguel's just kind of always been his dad, And

4:23

so his mom changed the changed

4:25

his last name to Bezos and that's how

4:27

he became Jeffrey bezos Is because this

4:30

this this Cuban immigrant dude kind

4:32

of uh stepped in

4:34

to his life and took over as his dad. So

4:36

he got pretty lucky there. Um,

4:38

it's a little bit of a winding story. I think it's

4:41

very funny that his dad abandoned him

4:43

to be a unicyclist, but also I

4:46

don't I think it's probably too much to say

4:48

that had an effect on him, because I don't think he really

4:50

it doesn't seem like he had any memory of

4:52

that, you know, so it's unlikely that that

4:54

like that laid some deep seated

4:57

wound that is responsible for anything that Amazon

4:59

has done. Right, And this this

5:01

guy, Miguel kind of took him under

5:03

his wing, right, Like, he seems to be quite instrumental

5:06

in you know, the way Bezos jeff

5:09

Bezos so the world growing up. Yeah,

5:11

And I think that's why Jeffrey kind of grows

5:13

up as a a very very

5:15

committed capitalist um.

5:17

Obviously, his dad is like an anti castro

5:20

activist as a kid um and then

5:22

as an you know, as an adult once he's graduated

5:25

and out in the world. Miguel works as a petroleum

5:27

engineer for Exxon, So he is like very

5:30

much into kind of some of the morally

5:32

grayer or morally blacker aspects

5:35

of of of of capitalism.

5:37

Um. Like, he's very

5:40

on board with big business, and I think his

5:43

attitudes towards kind of capitalism

5:45

versus socialism certainly have an impact

5:47

on young Jeffrey as he grows into

5:50

an adult. When

5:57

did we see these things kind of manifest

6:00

He didn't go straight to Amazon. Right, he built

6:02

this kind of built you know, he built a

6:04

good life for himself already before that. Yeah.

6:06

Yeah, so he's you know, he goes to his family

6:08

has number one. His his maternal

6:11

family is loaded, right, They've got he

6:13

He spends his summers as a kid on a twenty

6:15

five thousand acre ranch in Texas, which

6:17

is, you know, land is cheaper in Texas,

6:20

but you're not poor if your family's got twenty

6:22

five thousand, twenty five. There

6:25

are countries in Europe smaller than

6:27

this far um.

6:30

But it also means that Jeff like spends his childhood

6:32

with his grandpa doing a lot like practical

6:35

engineering, you know, learning how to like not

6:37

just put up fences, but like build different feeding

6:39

things for livestock, doing a lot of handyman

6:41

work, repairing engines and stuff. So

6:44

he grows up with this like really um,

6:48

like this really caught like a

6:50

lot of experience making things

6:52

and and working hard and this kind of like

6:55

he's very molded both by his

6:57

his adopted father's um

6:59

attitude towards free enterprise and

7:01

by this kind of very idyllic

7:05

rural American chunk of his upbringing

7:07

where he's you know working on a farm and self

7:09

reliance and all this stuff. And of course it's

7:11

self reliance within the context of it's his grandpa's

7:14

hobby farm. You know, his grandpa does

7:16

not have to make a living with this farm. His grandfather

7:18

was in the US nuclear program for

7:21

decades UM and then retired,

7:23

and this farm is kind of like his hobby as

7:25

as a retired man. So there's

7:28

there's you get two sides of it both, Like Jeff

7:30

is kind of convinced, I've grown up

7:32

with this kind of traditional American rural

7:35

self supporting, like you tell take

7:37

care of yourself, the government doesn't attitude. But

7:39

also the reason why

7:42

there it's so much more pleasant than

7:44

a lot of people who grow up in a rural agricultural

7:47

setting is that they're rich. You know, I

7:49

grew up in a farming community, and it's

7:51

it's not most people do not have

7:53

access to the resources he had. But I'm not sure he's

7:55

really aware of that. I think he kind of sees

7:58

himself as having assault of the earth up bringing,

8:00

even though that's really not the

8:02

case. Um. And he

8:04

he benefits as well because he's in he's

8:07

farming in the summers and then during the

8:09

rest of the year, he's in Houston. Um, that's where

8:11

his family kind of winds up and he

8:13

goes to this very special He's

8:15

in a public school, but his school

8:17

district has money for something. They call it the Vanguard

8:20

Program, and it's like this basically this super

8:22

special gifted and talented program where they're

8:24

kind of experimenting with with different

8:26

ways of of taking care

8:29

of of of or or of

8:31

teaching kids, and of course sort of like molding

8:34

the curriculum of the program to

8:36

the gifts of the children. And it it seems like a good

8:39

idea. It works really well for Jeff. And

8:41

it's it's you hear about stuff

8:43

like this too with um with

8:45

with Bill Gates in

8:47

particular, and I think Steve Jobs kind of benefited

8:50

from something similar when he was a kid. Ditto um

8:52

Wozniak. Where these are

8:55

at the very least upper middle class kids

8:58

who benefit from a specific

9:00

kind of educational program

9:02

that is not available to most kids. So Jeff

9:05

has very early access to computers. UM,

9:07

he's able to do what he wants in school

9:09

rather than kind of like do what the school wants him

9:12

to learn. The school is kind of go looking

9:14

at Okay, here's what Jeff's interested and here's

9:16

the stuff that he's he thinks is fascinating.

9:18

Let's mold his um, his

9:21

educational program to it. UM.

9:23

And he's a very competitive kid. There's a

9:25

writer who's sort of evaluating the school

9:28

program when he's like twelve or so. UM

9:30

and you know, decades later, she still

9:33

had her notes on him because he really struck

9:35

her as UM,

9:38

very intelligent, very competitive.

9:41

He was working on a science project

9:43

at the time called an infinity cube, which was this

9:45

battery powered thing with rotating mirrors

9:47

that made the optical illusion of an endless

9:49

tunnel. And it was a thing he'd seen in a

9:51

store but was expensive, so he like made

9:53

a version of it for himself for cheaper. UM.

9:56

He was entering a bunch of local science competitions

9:59

and winning them. He's he's a very very

10:01

like bright kid. Everyone kind of pegs this,

10:03

this kid out as special and they just this

10:06

whole community because again this is a public school

10:08

program. This whole community in Houston pours

10:10

resources into Jeff when he's a little kid. UM

10:14

and he graduates, Uh, he and his you know,

10:16

I think when he's in Florida by the time he graduates.

10:19

Um, but he uh, he

10:22

starts this kind of like after school program

10:24

the summer after he graduates with another kid where

10:27

they're like teaching younger kids

10:29

science stuff, doing like star gazing and whatnot

10:31

with them. Um. He has a really early

10:33

interest in space travel. Uh. He's

10:35

his favorite show is Star Trek. As a kid,

10:38

he's got kind of some of these utopian

10:40

dreams and it's weird because there's this mix

10:42

of like these sort of utopian

10:44

and Star Trek is coming at utopia from a very

10:47

left wing sort of perspective. Um,

10:50

and he's fascinated by that.

10:52

But all of his heroes are these businessmen

10:54

Walt Disney and Thomas Edison, these

10:56

guys who are um, real

10:58

like capitalist he os. And he actually

11:01

he prefers Disney to Edison, um

11:03

because he thinks Disney was better at

11:05

building a team and working together, like making

11:08

them work together in a concerted direction. And

11:10

it makes sense that Disney is kind of the person he

11:12

idolizes, right, because Amazon is

11:14

definitely has that sort of thing that Disney

11:17

has where they're pulling everything in

11:19

the world to them and making this kind of capitalist

11:22

katamari that that just owns everything

11:24

in a space, right, Yeah, yeah,

11:26

so he's come from he comes from

11:28

a very privileged background. He acts like

11:31

the way he talks, I agree with you. It's as

11:33

if I don't even think he's kind of

11:35

trying to present a fight narrative.

11:38

He just thinks because he was on a farm

11:40

that he's from some like, oh, I'm the

11:42

salt of the earth, I'm from the dirt. Like, no,

11:45

you're from the dirt on like a twenty five thousand

11:47

acre farm. That's very different. You know, if he

11:49

didn't want to, if his granddad decided

11:51

he was sick of that farm, it's not like they would have starved,

11:53

right, Yeah, they could have. They could have stopped

11:55

all of the farming and kept living comfortably

11:58

in the ranch house and would have would have been And

12:00

I think it's easy when you're in the kind of position he

12:02

was as a kid to note that, like, well,

12:04

we worked hard. You know, I was up at dawn

12:06

every day, we didn't stop working until night. We did

12:08

a bunch of really physically and mentally difficult

12:11

tasks. So that means like

12:14

I had kind of this working

12:16

class experience and upbringing,

12:18

and the reality is that you're not. You

12:20

don't really know any of that, you're not really

12:22

having the authentic experience if there's

12:24

not the fear of failure. I think

12:26

it's it's easy because he's working

12:29

hard as a kid for him to forget that.

12:32

He also has a safety net that

12:35

about like half a percent of

12:37

kids in America maybe benefit from,

12:39

you know. So so he goes on then too,

12:41

he doesn't exactly end up working in the farming industry

12:43

or anything like that, right, he kind of follows his dreams

12:46

of these kind of like capitalist heroes. Yeah,

12:48

he follows his dreams. He does start like a little kind

12:50

of educational business that does seem like

12:52

a decent thing to do. Um,

12:55

and then he goes off to college. He goes to

12:57

Princeton. He seemed most of

12:59

the people he went to journalists have found other

13:01

folks who were in his class. He made really no

13:03

impression on on most people. He's

13:05

very much like kind of a forgettable

13:07

dude. And in fact, one of the classmates

13:10

who like sets him up with a job after college,

13:12

so you would think this guy knew him

13:14

well. Like when the interviewed later after

13:17

Jeff is rich and famous, it's like, yeah, I don't remember

13:19

anything but that he was smart, like he does. He doesn't

13:21

really Um, he doesn't really leave much

13:23

of an impact like bright, but not

13:26

a dude whose personality like you

13:28

remember. Um and there's some weird he

13:30

doesn't like music. Um

13:32

and it doesn't appear to be a thing where like some people have

13:35

like an auditory processing issue right where it's

13:37

uncomfortable, like for whatever reason, music

13:39

just like it doesn't feel good

13:41

in their ears. I don't think it's that because they'll play

13:43

music for other people and stuff. So with that in mind,

13:46

let's take a look at a tweet Jeff Bezos

13:48

put out on February three, twenty

13:51

next to a picture of the singer

13:54

Lizzo, Bezos wrote quote,

13:56

I just took a DNA tist. Turns

13:59

out I'm one hun present Lizzo's

14:01

biggest fan. End quote.

14:03

Now, obviously that's very cringe to

14:06

say. But also this is from a guy that

14:08

apparently doesn't like music.

14:10

He's either lying, disingenuous

14:13

or he does actually like music. Who

14:15

knows which one it is? Just doesn't get it, you know,

14:17

he just doesn't understand why people like music,

14:20

which is which is interesting that some folks will

14:22

claim that this is why Apple beats

14:24

Amazon to the digital music game, right,

14:26

and and then Spotify later. Like Amazon

14:28

is for all the things, they're ahead of the curvan, kind

14:31

of always behind on digital music,

14:33

um, which there's a weird you know, the stuff with Joe

14:36

Rogan and Neil Young and the fight

14:38

over Spotify. There's kind of a weird

14:40

parallel there because Neil Young

14:42

when he deletes his catalog from Spotify,

14:45

I'm sure he has an issue with Joe Rogan, but

14:47

a big part of what Young is doing is he's he's

14:49

got a deal with Amazon Music, right, and so

14:51

he's plugging Amazon Music too, you know. Convenient.

14:55

They're all millionaires, right, Like you shouldn't

14:57

expect any of them to be your hero. But yeah,

14:59

so people will say that like that is

15:01

kind of why Amazon is consistently

15:04

behind the curve when it comes to digital

15:06

music, which is which is noteworthy just because

15:08

there one thing you have to give Amazon

15:10

credit on there, the head of the curve on most

15:12

things, you know, um,

15:15

but Bezos just doesn't get that, and so they're

15:17

kind of consistently behind. Um

15:20

And yeah, he uh. He eventually winds

15:22

up working in a company called Fittel,

15:24

which is like a finance a tech

15:27

finance company. This is in the mid eighties.

15:29

I think eight four eight five is

15:31

when he gets his first big boy job. Um.

15:34

And so that's this period where computers

15:36

are starting to become standard

15:39

in investment banks and brokerages, but they're still

15:41

not the norm. Right there there that that process

15:44

begins, the more forward thinking

15:46

investment banks and brokerages are putting

15:48

computers in, right, but a lot of this is

15:50

still done by analog you know, today all trading

15:52

is kind of done by these machines, and there's some

15:55

human input, but like a lot of it is

15:57

these computers kind of gambling with each

15:59

other. This is the V's He's

16:01

in on the ground floor of that process, and

16:03

he is working with a company

16:05

that basically gets hired by these big banks

16:07

and brokerages to help them set

16:10

up these networked computer banks

16:12

that are initially just kind of augmenting

16:14

human decision making, but will eventually take

16:16

it over to a very large extent in

16:19

finance. You know, that's how things work

16:21

now. And he is he's he's UM. I don't

16:23

think he's necessarily a huge part because he's not

16:25

a visionary part of this, right He's

16:27

working for the visionaries who see where the

16:29

future is going to be here, but he is also

16:32

as a code or helping to build this, so he's

16:34

definitely like it's a good internship

16:36

for him in terms of he's experiencing

16:39

work with these people who have seen the future

16:41

and and helping to kind of make it with people.

16:43

And he he bounces around a few of these

16:45

early fintech companies until

16:48

in nineteen eighty nine, Um,

16:50

he starts having a conversation with a colleague

16:53

about like, Hey, you know, we're we're

16:55

setting up these computer networks, um

16:57

that are that are connecting like brokerage

17:00

and allowing them to basically gamble a lot

17:02

faster. Uh, what if we were to

17:04

set up like a a networked

17:06

computer intranet thing that anyone could

17:08

use to like connect to news stories which will

17:11

be curated algorithmically based

17:13

on a person's interest. Um,

17:15

and they almost get investments in the idea you

17:17

know you'll do this is basically like how Facebook

17:20

and Twitter work, right, Um, it's a version

17:22

of that. It doesn't quite happen, but

17:24

the fact that Bezos is sort of thinking about

17:26

this in nineteen nine

17:28

shows that he does have a

17:31

really pretty deep understanding

17:33

of where networked computing is going

17:35

to go right, Like he's not just following

17:37

the trend. He's predicted, Oh, this is gonna

17:39

be a big deal. Um, And he's very much ahead of the

17:41

eight ball on that um. I

17:43

think in the late eight like

17:46

early nineties, he gets a job with

17:48

an investment with an investment

17:50

firm that manages a hedge fund called d E.

17:52

Shaw Um, which is this

17:55

as firms go, it's one of these ones

17:57

that's really ahead of the curve. They're doing a lot of comput

18:00

uter stuff. The guy who runs it is hiring

18:02

a lot of programmers, and Bezos is

18:04

a fucking superstar there,

18:06

you know, um, his colleagues

18:08

and he's both a superstar, but he also

18:11

he's clearly already thinking about his

18:13

legend. Right. People who work with him will

18:16

note that he would like keep a sleeping bag

18:18

in his office so that he could work

18:20

overnight if he needed to. But the main purpose

18:23

of the sleeping bag was not for him

18:25

to actually sleep at work, because he didn't do that often.

18:27

He just kept it in view so his employees

18:29

would see it and like would think, oh,

18:31

Jeff, you know, we need I need to work

18:33

like that, because Jeff is like crashing at work sometimes

18:37

he's using it as a prop right, just when through it

18:39

for a second. I think this point that Robot is

18:41

explaining is very interesting if

18:43

you look at how Amazon went on after

18:45

Bezos started it. He's always

18:47

saying, hope, people need to just work harder.

18:50

But as we see here, he allegedly used props

18:52

to give the impression that he was the hardest worker

18:54

buck in the day. Now the hardest workers

18:57

are on the warehouse floor and he's

18:59

telling them I need to work as hard as him.

19:01

Perhaps he's still using props now. He's

19:03

very much bought into the kind of myths

19:06

we say about like how you ought to work and

19:08

kind of you know, this is how you get ahead is by

19:10

being uh, you know, the busiest,

19:13

and by you know, sleeping at your desk and

19:15

and and basically living at the office. This kind

19:17

of stuff that that is huge in the tech industry,

19:20

right. This is why Google has sleeping

19:22

rooms and massages on site, and like

19:24

they try to keep people at the office as

19:26

often as possible. Um,

19:28

you know this is this is just kind of uh,

19:32

he's he wants to I think

19:34

he he understands that

19:36

mythologizing as an important part of

19:38

being a founder and I think even though

19:40

he's not a founder at this point, he wants to found

19:43

a a big tech company. You

19:45

know that that is beginning to be his ambition.

19:48

Um, but he's working at D E. Shaw, He's

19:50

doing great. He meets a woman

19:52

named mckenzy Tuttle while working

19:54

at the Hedge Fund. She graduated from Princeton

19:56

to She actually studied with Tony Morrison

19:59

when she at an English degree, which is a is

20:01

weird that there's a connection between Tony Morrison

20:03

and Jeff Bezos that close, But there

20:05

you go. Um, she's a novelist

20:08

and she's kind of working as a secretary in this

20:10

tech company and she winds

20:13

up with a big crush on Jeff. And it is one of those

20:15

things like we talked about Bill Gates. Bill

20:17

Gates has gotten in some trouble recently because he had

20:19

a history of creepily hitting on women who were

20:21

his employees at Microsoft

20:23

Conn. Yeah, and some kind of

20:25

connections to Epstein. We could go out for a while about

20:28

about that. Um, it does not appear

20:30

to be that kind of case with Bezos. McKenzie,

20:32

even though she's divorced him now, is adamant that like

20:34

she was the one who started hitting on him.

20:37

Um. She was the one who kind of pushed

20:39

him to go out with her and fell in love with

20:41

him. And it does seem they stayed together a long

20:43

time you know. Um, you

20:46

know they've split up now, but they were together like twenty

20:48

years or so. Um. And

20:50

she was a big part of the creation of Amazon.

20:52

So whatever else, it does seem like,

20:55

uh, he is a human being who was capable

20:57

of connecting with another person, which I guess

20:59

there you go. Um.

21:02

Yeah, So they she

21:04

gets together with mckensey while

21:06

he's working at D. E. Shaw and he

21:08

starts to this is the you know, he's

21:11

making really good money at this he's not like

21:13

a millionaire, but he's extremely comfortable.

21:16

But he starts to kind of chafe. Not because

21:18

he likes his boss. He likes what they're doing, but

21:20

it's not his business. And he's already had this

21:22

idea that he really wants to

21:25

to to create one that he's he's kind of started

21:27

forming while talking with his boss at d Shaw.

21:30

He wanted to build something he called the Everything

21:32

Store. Um. So this is the

21:34

early nineties, you know, this is kind of right

21:36

around the period a little before the period that we hit

21:38

eternal September, you know, where

21:41

everybody is online. This is like immediately

21:43

before that happens. But Jeff

21:46

sees the potential of the Internet and

21:48

recognizes that a huge amount of commerce

21:50

is going to take part in it, and that if you, because

21:53

of what the internet is, if you could build

21:55

a store with the kind of distribution

21:57

center necessary, you could sell

21:59

every thing to anyone, you know, as

22:01

opposed to having to kind of uh

22:04

locally curate your your inventory

22:06

and deal with all of that. Like, you could have a store that

22:08

could sell everything cheaper

22:10

than basically anyone else, um, and undercut

22:12

all these retail change chains, um.

22:15

And he has one of the the idea he has about this that's

22:17

particularly innovative. That's that's new at

22:20

this point you have to think, you know, we're talking four.

22:23

He wants to he wants the

22:25

sales on the store to be heavily driven

22:27

by consumer reviews, you know. And you

22:29

can see this as kind of him branching off from this

22:32

idea he has for an algorithmically curated

22:34

news service. He wants people reviewing

22:36

products to have an

22:39

influence on how often those products show up

22:41

when other people go to the site and he

22:43

wants that to drive people to buy things,

22:45

like the reviews of customers, you know, and

22:47

that is again really new at this point because

22:49

the internet, like you have to think, if

22:51

you're if you're shot, if all of your shopping is like

22:54

going to a mall or a store, you're not buying

22:56

things generally because like of a review.

22:58

You know, if you get a review, it's like someone whose

23:00

job, who works at Wired or whatever, whose

23:02

job is to review products, as opposed

23:05

to anyone who buys a product

23:07

being able to leave a review online and you can see,

23:09

oh, eight hundred people gave this a five star rating,

23:11

and you know that means it's probably good. Um.

23:14

That's the big idea that Jeff has. Uh.

23:16

And he grows obsessed with this idea

23:18

of the everything store. Um.

23:21

He starts to feel like, in the mid nineties, it's

23:24

probably time to do this, So

23:26

he quits his high paying job, so

23:28

does Mackenzie, and he and his wife drive

23:31

to California. Um because they initially

23:33

right, you know, that's where most people would would

23:35

start a tech business in both this period

23:37

and now, But he decides taxes

23:39

are too high. Um. Because the thing about

23:41

e commerce, right, and this is the way it's

23:44

it works, or at least it worked for a while. I think there's

23:46

been some changes. But um consumers

23:49

at the time where you would only have to

23:51

pay taxes on whatever

23:54

the like, the business would only have to pay

23:56

taxes based on like the state

23:58

that it resided in, you know. UM.

24:00

And so he winds up taxes

24:03

in California are too high, doesn't make sense. He

24:05

goes to Washington State because

24:07

it has good infrastructure, UM.

24:10

But it has a tiny population. So Washington

24:13

does have sales tax. But

24:15

um, because it's not a populous state.

24:18

It means every state other than Washington that people

24:20

buy from in this story he's going to be creating

24:22

don't have to pay sales tax. So this is kind of his

24:24

way of minimizing the number of customers who might

24:26

have to pay sales tax on products for what's

24:29

going to become Amazon. UM.

24:31

And he starts with the plan to sell books UM.

24:34

Mainly because all books come

24:36

from one or two there's one or two companies in

24:38

the United States that distribute all

24:41

of the books everywhere. You know, they sell the books

24:43

to the stores. They're the ones who actually they're not producing

24:45

the books, but they're the ones who are like gathering them and

24:47

putting them in warehouses and shipping them out to where

24:49

they need to go. So he sees, like the

24:53

book industry already has pretty

24:56

good infrastructure. It would make it easy

24:58

for me to order books anywhere in the kind tree

25:00

and get them shipped to anywhere in the country.

25:03

Um. So he starts. He decides that I'm

25:05

going to start by selling books online, all books,

25:07

so it's like a bookstore. And again, this is a really

25:09

new idea at the time. You don't have to like

25:11

go to the bookstore and see if you can find

25:13

something, or like have them special orders something. Everything

25:16

is just available all the time. Um.

25:18

They wanted to call it Cadabra at

25:20

first, and then make it so dot com

25:23

because again he's a big star trek nerd

25:25

um. But their friends thankfully talk

25:28

them out of most of these things. They go

25:30

through a bunch of different names, um

25:32

and relentless dot Com

25:34

I think is Jeff's favorite. You can actually

25:37

still go to relentless dot com today if you type

25:39

it in, it will take you to Amazon. Um.

25:42

But yeah, so they they they start

25:44

this business. They eventually land upon Amazon

25:47

as a name, and it's worth noting that

25:49

like when this business uh,

25:52

when when he starts this company he puts

25:54

ten grand of his own money in it, which is a significant

25:57

amount of money in like uh,

26:00

but it's also primarily funded by eighty

26:02

four thousand dollars in interest free

26:04

loans UM, some of them from his

26:06

first employees who are people he met in

26:08

the financial tech industry UH,

26:10

and pour money into it UM and a

26:13

lot of it comes from his parents, and

26:15

in fact, they eventually invest a hundred thousand

26:17

dollars of it in UM

26:20

of their own money. So it is this thing.

26:22

It's the same deal with Elon Musk really

26:24

um where he

26:27

gets his business. First business gets

26:29

started because of money that his dad

26:31

UM, and his mom and dad pump into the

26:33

business. So remember, kids, the moral of

26:35

the story here is if you want to make it

26:38

big in business, all we

26:40

have to do is have rich parents.

26:42

That's it. Jeff

26:50

tells them there's a seventy chance they're going to lose

26:52

it all. Uh. The fact that they're willing to

26:54

invest that in him says a lot both about

26:56

their level of financial um

26:59

privilege and about you know, just they believe

27:01

in their sons. So it's this mix of like, well,

27:04

that's very sweet. But it's also this continuing

27:06

story where it's like, yeah, part of why Jeff

27:08

Bezos is so successful is he got every lucky

27:10

break a motherfucker can get. You know. It's

27:13

this this consistent story with

27:15

these these big tech founders

27:17

where they all have part

27:21

that they all have the best fucking

27:23

luck they could possibly have had, you know, jobs

27:26

Gates musk Uh.

27:29

It's it's a very consistent story where it's

27:31

like, yeah, you were rich, you

27:34

had all of the educational resources,

27:36

you had, all of the backing

27:38

of your family, you had, um,

27:41

you know, everything about your life

27:43

up to this point was geared at clearing

27:45

a path to you and making it easy. And

27:48

again, I think it's easy for them to miss

27:50

that. I think it's easy for a guy like Bezos to miss that

27:53

because you're still working hard. You know,

27:55

um, you're still putting in a lot of hours.

27:57

But motherfucker, there's a lot of people who work

27:59

just is hard and don't have parents who can throw a hundred

28:02

thousand dollars that their business idea. You know. So

28:05

Amazon, there's a couple of sneaky things

28:07

that they start to do early on. One of them

28:09

is that this this this. These book distributors

28:11

have a rule where you have to order ten copies

28:14

of a book at a time for them to ship it to you. You know,

28:16

because they're selling two bookstores, they're

28:18

not selling to individuals. Amazon

28:21

is not that big at this point, so it's it would be a huge

28:23

waste of money for them to order ten

28:25

copies of of a single book UM

28:28

or ten copies of books. You have to order tin books at

28:30

a time basically, and they don't have enough volume

28:32

initially. So what they do is they'll order

28:34

like the books that they have orders for from their

28:37

customers, and then they'll fill out the rest of the

28:39

tin with copies of books they know are out of print,

28:41

and those out of stock orders get auto

28:43

canceled, but the company will ship the two or three

28:46

orders that aren't out of stock UH

28:48

to Amazon anyway, and

28:50

that saves Amazon a lot of money kind of at the expense

28:53

of these distributors that they're working with. Um.

28:56

They get another hundred and forty five thousand dollars

28:58

from his parents a year or so later, because you

29:01

know, it's an early company, it's it's burning

29:03

money very quickly. It loses three thousand

29:05

dollars and ninety five. UM.

29:08

But you know, he Jeff does

29:10

kind of say, hey, this there's

29:12

a good chance this will fail. Mom and dad. Now you've put

29:14

a quarter of a million bucks in. But he also starts

29:16

to investors projecting net sales of seventy

29:19

four million dollars by the year two thousand, um.

29:21

And he is way off because

29:24

his actual net sales by two thousand or one point

29:26

six four billion. UM.

29:28

Yeah, Amazon grows really fucking

29:30

quickly. Uh. There's all these sort

29:32

of attitudes from the early days. You know,

29:34

every big tech company kind of mythologizes

29:37

it's early days. Um.

29:39

Amazon's first company motto is

29:42

get big fast. UM.

29:44

They have an I p O in nine seven.

29:46

They have this legal fight with um

29:48

um, with Barnes and Noble. And

29:51

while they're kind of doing this in these in these

29:53

early days, Jeff's writing his first letter

29:55

to shareholders, you know, because they have their I p O

29:57

in nineties seven. And one of the things he writes

30:00

in this letter is, this is day one for the Internet

30:02

and if we execute it well for Amazon

30:04

dot com. And day one is

30:06

like a religious thing in Amazon.

30:09

UM. Day one thinking is they

30:11

is the way they kind of talk about it like you

30:13

need to be thinking like it is day one,

30:16

you know, for the for the future, for the Internet, for whatever

30:18

it is you're working on. You have to have this

30:20

this um acceptance of kind of infinite

30:23

possibility. That's the attitude that

30:25

he tries to inculcate within his

30:27

employees. UM. People

30:29

work very very hard at

30:31

Amazon. They do not have initially,

30:34

like they have just a couple of warehouses at

30:36

first, for like the first big Christmas rushes

30:38

they have UM. And he forces his employees

30:41

during one of these Christmas is to leave their

30:44

homes and families for two weeks and

30:46

spend time either working customer

30:48

service lines or working in warehouses to

30:50

distribute books. UM. He keeps his

30:52

workers to to a hotel room.

30:54

UM. And it's this you know, it's

30:57

an early version of what will happen later where

30:59

uh yeah, he's he doesn't

31:02

you know, whatever has to happen to keep

31:04

the warehouses most efficient is what's

31:06

going to happen. And he's kind of you

31:09

see, from the beginning, there's not a whole lot

31:11

of belief that Bezos has that

31:13

you ought to that your family

31:15

life is more important than Amazon shipping out

31:18

products. Right, it's certainly not to him,

31:20

and he doesn't feel like it should be for anyone else.

31:23

And that's okay when you've got this

31:25

tiny startup company and everybody involved

31:27

has some equity, and everybody involved is

31:30

the same kind of crazy. But as

31:32

it gets bigger and bigger, these warehouses

31:34

get bigger and bigger, and these people aren't cut into the

31:36

profits. These people don't have any

31:38

kind of um buy into the organization.

31:41

But he still has the same attitude

31:44

that like, well, you shouldn't have a life

31:46

outside of this if if that's going

31:48

to at all reduce the efficiency

31:51

of the warehouse. It's It's interesting because

31:53

from the very early on you

31:55

saw what was just basically

31:57

now the reason there is so much bad US

32:00

on Amazon, the reason um

32:02

the Mega code this podcast even exists,

32:04

it started very early on, you know what I mean.

32:07

It starts at the very beginning. There's stories

32:10

that are told almost as like pride

32:13

of like employees weeping at their desks

32:16

because they're so overworked. Um,

32:18

and that that's in line with like his the

32:21

the motto that he wants his employees

32:23

to have is I'm peculiar, which

32:26

basically means like I'm willing to work

32:28

like a crazy person and and cut

32:30

years off of my life in order to make this company

32:33

a success. UM. He comes

32:35

up with this list of fourteen rules UM

32:39

that are you know, his attitudes

32:41

on on business and whatnot. They're kind of

32:43

like the religious founding of Amazon

32:45

corporate culture. UM. A lot of it's

32:47

just kind of stuff like higher and developed the best,

32:50

which I think every company agrees

32:53

is important. But he also wants employees to

32:55

exhibit ownership of

32:58

of the chunk of the business they're working on UM

33:00

and do deep dives to like find things

33:02

that are problems and fix them. And that

33:04

is that is that attitude of ownership

33:07

I think goes both ways. He wants employees to

33:09

act as if they own the part of Amazon

33:11

that they're working on, so it's very personal to them

33:14

UM. But he also is going to act as

33:16

if he owns you, you know, like that's that's

33:18

his attitude, and yeah, you're

33:21

a product. And there's this very They developed this very mechanical

33:24

method of analyzing employee

33:26

UM success or failure.

33:28

They have these like fifty sixty page long

33:31

employee evaluations that have these

33:33

that are filled with numbers that are kind of like

33:35

statistical uh derivations

33:37

of like how that employee is doing or

33:39

this employee is doing. Um. And

33:42

employees are expected to like memorize these

33:44

different numbers that are put together

33:46

by the company to explain their success

33:48

or failure and be willing to like be

33:51

able to recite them when like their manager

33:53

calls them and asks about a number. You have

33:55

to be able to have an answer to that kind of stuff. Um,

33:59

yeah, it's it's not And and Bezos

34:01

become like is kind of famous for his

34:03

temper um. He's he's very

34:05

commonly screams at people in meetings. He likes

34:08

to mock and to ride employees when they

34:10

when they fail or when they say something that

34:12

he doesn't think is like a good enough answer.

34:15

Um. He's very kind

34:17

of like infamous for breaking

34:19

people down during meetings uh and attacking

34:22

them. Um. There's

34:24

also this kind of early on attitude Amazon

34:26

has that like, if you're a woman,

34:29

um, you haven't a kid or anything is

34:31

not like an excuse for uh.

34:35

And it's not even that, it's that there's this story this woman Elizabeth

34:37

Willett, who's like a former army captain who

34:40

gets a child and because she has a kid now

34:42

she wants to leave come to work

34:44

earlier and leave earlier so she can pick her baby

34:46

up and then go work at home like she's working the

34:48

same hours as everyone else. She just alters her schedule,

34:51

but she gets in trouble because it looks

34:53

like she's leaving earlier to her employees

34:55

who are coming in later. Um,

34:58

and her boss is like, I'm not going to defend you

35:00

because it doesn't look good to your peers. And this is

35:02

this is you. Hear a lot of stories like this at Amazon

35:04

where um, because so much

35:06

of the employee evaluations are your coworkers,

35:09

You're you're supposed to kind of attack and poke

35:11

holes in the performance of your co workers. It's very

35:13

competitive. Um, there's this really

35:16

abusive attitude towards people who

35:18

you know, anything goes wrong in their lives. If you

35:20

get sick, you know, if you have a death in the family.

35:23

Um, even if that doesn't actually impact

35:26

your your actual work performance.

35:29

If you like miss a day, everyone who works

35:31

with you is going to attack you for it, and that's going to be

35:33

in your performance review. And so it leads

35:36

to people like breaking down again. This people

35:38

weeping at their desks is incredibly common.

35:41

People just having these like emotional

35:43

collapses. Um,

35:45

and a lot of it's driven by, you know, because

35:48

Jeff is the kind of guy who too

35:50

employees faces, will insult

35:52

them and attack them and give these very detailed

35:54

breakdowns of like why they've failed him.

35:57

And he builds a system with an Amazon

35:59

that is supposed to spread

36:01

that attitude out to everyone

36:03

else. Like again, Amazon is This

36:05

is kind of I guess the most important point

36:08

and maybe even like the penultimate point I want to

36:10

make here. Amazon is. The way that

36:12

it works, the way that it treats people is an extension

36:14

of how Jeff Bezos treats people.

36:16

Like he built it to work that

36:19

way. It is everything that

36:21

is kind of abusive an anti human about the company's

36:23

labor practices is that way because

36:25

it's how Jeff thinks people

36:27

should be treated um, and it's how he treats

36:30

people in person. You know, these big, impersonal

36:32

robotic systems are a

36:35

reflection of how he treats individuals

36:37

who work for him, including people who he's known

36:39

for years. He's very famous for, like somebody

36:41

will like spend years and years working

36:44

eighty hour weeks and be integral to the company's

36:46

success, and then the instant they stumble,

36:48

he fires them and replaces them with someone else. There's

36:50

no understanding of like and you

36:52

know, there's plenty of failures that Bezos makes.

36:54

He never has to pay for them, right, like him missing

36:57

out on Apple Music and you know, failing to

36:59

understand that that's an area for Amazon.

37:01

He doesn't get fired for that, but he lets people

37:03

go where edges them out and replaces

37:05

them with someone younger for much smaller

37:08

snaffoos um. And it's

37:10

yeah, it's it's I think that's kind of the

37:12

best point to end on is that when

37:15

you think about the things that are anti human, that

37:17

are really fucked up about how

37:19

Amazon functions, those

37:21

things are fundamentally reflections of

37:23

how Bezos treats the people in his own

37:25

life. This company is a direct

37:27

reflection of his personal morally.

37:32

It was Robert Evans going into the details

37:35

of Jeff Bezos and how he

37:37

formed Amazon in his own

37:39

image. In the

37:41

next episode of Megacorp, will

37:43

be looking into how Amazon screwed

37:46

over its flex drivers. Megacorp

37:52

is made by my production company

37:54

H eleven for Cool Zone

37:56

Media. It's written, researched,

37:58

and produced by myself, Jake

38:01

Hanrahan. It was also

38:03

produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music

38:07

is by some black graphics

38:09

by Adam Doyle and sound engineering

38:11

by Splicing Block. If

38:14

you want to get in touch, follow me on

38:16

social media at Jake

38:18

Underscore Hanrahan. That's

38:20

h a n a A h

38:23

a n