Good morning,
Brad Stone is the senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News, and pertinently to this site, the author of The Everything Store, the definitive book about Amazon. The Everything Store is one of the most-cited books on Stratechery, particularly in The Amazon Tax, the Article that continues to undergird much of my Amazon analysis.
On Tuesday, Stone released Amazon Unbound; the subtitle is “Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire”, which captures the degree to which this book is a very different story than The Everything Store. Late last week I had the chance to sit down with Stone to explore those differences, and get his take on some of the most interesting stories in the book, as well as his outlook for Amazon post-Bezos (and an idea for another book).
As a reminder, the Daily Update Podcast is particularly useful for interviews, even if you are generally a reader; today’s interview is available now.
On to the interview:
An Interview with Brad Stone about Amazon Unbound
My questions are in bold; this interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Brad, I am excited to talk to you. The Everything Store is one of my favorite books. People often ask me the books that I read, and my favorites by far are the origin story books. To me, it tells you so much about a company’s future decisions, even fifteen, twenty years, thirty years down the road. When you understand the formative moments of a company’s history, that is what gets embedded in the culture and becomes just what you do, and I think The Everything Store did a great job with that — I think it’s the book I’ve cited probably more than any other on Stratechery.
What’s interesting about Amazon Unbound is it’s clearly a companion to The Everything Store, right? I thought you did a really good job of summarizing The Everything Store in one chapter, but it’s a very different book. One thing I noticed, for example, just on a very tangible level, is that Amazon Unbound has 408 end notes, and they’re very long, and The Everything Store has 213. Is this just a difference between traveling back in time and doing reporting on a startup, versus trying to get your arms around one of the largest and most important companies in the world?
Brad Stone: Yeah, thanks Ben. Well it was such a different process for a number of reasons. One is back in 2011, when I started The Everything Store, Amazon was a different company, it was a simpler company. It certainly didn’t loom as large in our world, in our imagination, as it does today. I had no idea at the time that I was writing about a company that was as important as Amazon would become. The story was simpler, it was linear. I weep for the days when the Amazon story could be linear, where you could follow one thread and it would be a simple chronology and that really was the Amazon story for the first fifteen years. Toward the end, it gets a little complicated as Kindle and AWS and Prime are developed together, but that was a relatively simple narrative feat to kind of organize those.
Essentially the story of Amazon Unbound is a couple of years after The Everything Store came out, and I was still talking, bloviating about Amazon and The Everything Store as if I’m an expert, and I realized that the company had changed so dramatically. AWS has blown up, the transportation division, Amazon Logistics is driving in our neighborhoods and putting planes in the air. The marketplace is global. Suddenly Jeff Bezos is a master of the universe, a completely different figure, and I figured there was a lot more work to do. And then to your point, it was a much different process. It took me three years — The Everything Store maybe took me a year and a half. Figuring out how all of these different pieces of the Amazon story cohere, and to shoehorn it into a narrative that readers could digest, was really a difficult feat.
One thing that I noticed is that Amazon Unbound has this huge picture of Bezos on the cover, right? Whereas The Everything Store he’s kind of behind a box, it’s more cutesy, and it does fit the motif of this startup struggle story versus this larger than life figure. What was interesting to me, and I think this is what you’re driving at, is that The Everything Store was a story about Bezos, and thus by definition, a story about Amazon. Whereas Amazon Unbound feels like a story about two different entities that sometimes interact. It’s about Bezos, and it’s about Amazon, and sometimes they’re together, and sometimes they’re not. Is that the feeling you had writing it?
BS: I think so. I mean, I devote chapters to Blue Origin, to the Washington Post, to Jeff’s personal scandal in late 2018 and 2019, and those aren’t really Amazon stories. I mean, Amazon tends to come in, and certainly the personal saga reflects on Amazon, and it’s interesting the points at which Blue Origin and the Washington Post intersect with Amazon, but they are largely different. Yet the book is called Amazon Unbound, and the the making of a global empire.
So I think you’re right, it’s about those two things. I think Bezos is at the heart of both threads in the story, and he’s the central character of the story, but I devote a lot of time to trying to understand central Amazon figures like Dave Clark, who’s now the CEO of the consumer business. Andy Jassy, who’s the CEO of the whole thing, starting later this summer. Doug Herrington. A lot of these folks who people really don’t know who they are. Doug Herrington is now the head of Amazon Consumer, and he was the guy who ushered Amazon into the grocery business. So that was a pleasure to be able to get away from Jeff a little bit, and to introduce readers to some of these people who have had a really big impact at the company, and by virtue of that really an impact on its customers’ lives.
Yeah, those were my favorite chapters, I would say. The chapters where actually there’s very little Bezos, but you really got an understanding of the different figures, and how they came up through the ranks. In some respects, it gives you a good feel for sort of what Amazon might be like after Bezos. Did interviewing and talking to these folks increase your confidence in the post-Bezos Amazon?
BS: Interesting. Well, I think the one thing that I really discovered in both books, and somehow managed to be surprised by it, even in the researching of Amazon Unbound, is how central Bezos is to the invention process at Amazon. You do the archeology on ideas like Alexa and the Go Store, on the push into video and we maybe tell some of these stories later, but on funny little private label product ideas, like the Single Cow Burger, which Amazon Fresh offers, and you do the archeology and it always traces back to a nutty idea by Jeff on a whiteboard or in an email, and everyone scrambled to make it happen. He personally oversaw it, and he authorized the investments in it, and he authorized it when other people were unclear how it could happen.
And so, no. I do think, like he says, he’s going to stick around and still play that role, but I think Amazon still needs to prove itself as an invention or an innovation engine without Jeff. I mean, Jassy obviously has done a great job at AWS, but he’s really an operator, he’s not a technical genius. Jeff had some of the first insights that led to the creation of AWS. Andy has a lot of smart technical people around him, but Jeff has also played a role in the evolution of that business. I think the success of Amazon in the future is going to hinge on if and when they have to replace that piece of invention DNA, that Jeff will take with him when he leaves. You look at the S-team now, and there aren’t a lot of technical people on it anymore. You could almost count on one hand, Charlie Bell from AWS, or Rohit Prasad from the Alexa team. It’s an amazingly accomplished group of operators and entrepreneurs, but essentially Jeff is the invention personality in the company, like Steve Jobs was at Apple. And so the question is, and we can’t answer it yet, does Amazon after Jeff, after he leaves, continue to be innovative?
It reminds me one of my favorite lines in the book, which was when you were talking about Amazon’s failure to build a consumer private label brand — they obviously built a bunch of them, but one that actually resonated with the broader public — I’m going to quote, “Amazon, which remained largely the land of engineers, MBAs, and a CEO who considered himself a swashbuckling inventor.” It was interesting for a lot of reasons. One, I’m an MBA, so it’s nice to have at least one company that considers me worthwhile. But at the same, this was in the context of a book that discussed Bezos in Hollywood, and that’s a theme that is woven throughout the book. These sort of diverging paths of Amazon and Bezos that I referenced before, is there just some bit where Jeff was tired of hanging out with engineers and MBAs, and he wanted to hang out with some other folks?
BS: Well, first of all, it’s ironic because in the early years of Amazon, MBAs were really eschewed —
I owe Andy Jassy a lot.
BS: Dave Clark tells a story, he was an MBA, and on his first interview, the recruiter actually told him, “You probably aren’t going to be happy, your day is not going to go that well here.” But obviously Amazon’s evolved quite a bit since-
Oh I remember when I interviewed with Amazon back in, it must have been 2010. I wanted to work for AWS, I didn’t want to work for the retail store. And they told me, “No. You can interview with us for the retail store, but you’re not going anywhere near AWS.” So I actually canceled the interview.
BS: That’s funny. Well to your question, Jeff’s adventures in Hollywood, were really the result of a rational procession of decisions, leading from starting with the decline of the DVD business, into the necessary replacement with the VOD business, then addressing Netflix disruption with subscription video on demand, then coming to the realization that HBO and Showtime had two decades before, that that’s an expensive proposition unless you create your own content, and then getting into Amazon Studios and Amazon Originals. Then I think he realized as he goes into it with the same philosophy as he goes into everything else with, which is what can we do differently? And at first it’s this notion of a scientific studio, and they’re going to crowdsource –
Right, that was amazing.
BS: Yeah, create processes around making these bets on TV show concepts so that they could have a better batting average, and of course that’s not how creativity works, so that fails. And he even at one point reels off a list of ingredients that shows should have, and the Hollywood folks are kind of embarrassed about that because nobody in Hollywood wants to think about themselves as just following a formula. But what happens throughout this process is Jeff often lends himself personally to give a little bit of an extra boost to products and things. He does that in Hollywood, he goes to the award shows and he likes it. He finds himself enjoying it quite a bit, and who wouldn’t want to be at a party with Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck, and find all this attention —
Where you’re the biggest star.
BS: Totally! Right. And that’s also human nature. I do think he enjoyed it, he enjoyed spending time on it, it probably seeded some of the dysfunction in that group, because he has very particular ideas. When you’re talking about a voice-activated computer, maybe that’s more of his domain than what’s going to be the next big hit, and it created some tensions with some of the early leadership teams there. Then arguably it set him off on a path that ended up with some changes in his personal life — that’s kind of speculation, but it’s interesting because I don’t get the sense that he’s spending quite as much time on the Amazon Originals as he was back in 2017.
Well one of the themes in the book was you definitely set out Bezos as inventor, but the other thing is this idea that he was often only roused to action if he felt competitively threatened. You talk about this in context of groceries, goods from China, even space and Blue Origin, the treatment of workers I think was another place where you brought it up. At the same time — and this gets to the point about the new leadership going forward — you have a line in the book about how employees were supposed to not pay attention to the competition. They’re just supposed to sort of do their job. Was this competitive response a Bezos-only thing, or is that in Amazon’s culture? How does that carry forward without him?
BS: I think that the whole, “We don’t really focus on competitors, we are obsessed about the customers,” that there was always something that was — Amazon’s not the only company that says that — but always something a little disingenuous about it.
(laughs)Yeah, I think so.
BS: There was a group — I write about this in The Everything Store — called competitive analysis or something like that and the finance folks were in charge of it, and they would order products from competing retailers and time their delivery, and create, study, and tabulate the metrics of how good competing retailers were. Amazon is a student of the competition.
Jeff tends to, I think, separate things into two categories: land grabs, where you have to move quickly, and then long-term greenfield opportunities. Groceries is a great example, he just thought that that was going to be there for Amazon and that they could let Amazon Fresh go in a couple of markets, but he was going to invest in what he thought were the land rushes like China, and Alexa, and the Fire Phone. It was only until Instacart started to have real traction, and Google introduced Google Express — I think this is about 2014-2015 — that they started to take it really seriously. I mean, it was competition-driven, right? They understood that the grocery relationship is a multiple times a week, close connection with the customer and that even though it’s low margin, it’s important, and that Amazon’s strategic flank was opened if somebody else got there first. And so then you saw Prime Now, and eventually the acquisition of Whole Foods.
My two favorite chapters in the book were the ones about competing with Wish and AliExpress and the other folks that were selling products directly from China, and the 2017 OP1 meeting where Bezos pushed for profitability.
Starting with the first one, did you get any sense of regret from Amazon about the impact of Chinese competition on the marketplace? You spent a lot of time talking about how it’s negatively impacted their traditional merchant base, it’s the source of a lot of the frustration. I thought it was really interesting, you said that, “Oh, it’s hard to tell for sure what people think, because of course the people that are complaining raise problems. I’m going to go talk to the people that praised it.” And then they all had flipped, right? They’re like, “No, actually it’s terrible now.” I’m like “Come on, Brad. You’re not going to seriously just go to Amazon’s pet sellers.” But no, it actually made it that much more compelling that they were often sort of the most negative about what’s happened to the marketplace and obviously the impact on Amazon is the reputation of goods. People are much more worried now that they’re going to order something on Amazon and it’s going to be counterfeit or wherever it might be. You seem bummed out about it in the book that this has happened, do you get any sense that Amazon feels bummed out about it?
BS: So I think the answer to that question is it can be found in Amazon’s intransigent response to the accusation that the brand managers in charge of private label products peeked at third-party sellers to figure out what to launch. And that those allegations have been made in the Wall Street Journal, and in Bloomberg, and in my book, I cover it and it’s so clear that the internal guardrails against that happening, against Amazon managers looking at what’s selling well in the marketplace and then copying it, that for years that those guardrails weren’t there and yet Amazon, even in public testimony in response to congressional investigators, and Bezos himself when he appeared last year, refuses to say that they made a mistake — maybe their lawyers are saying they can’t. And so that is to answer your question that no, I don’t think Amazon is really capable of saying the marketplace for all of its tremendous benefits, and look, there are companies now that are rolling up brands on Amazon and aggregating Amazon sellers-
That’s a huge market, yeah.
BS: So there’s obviously a lot of success, positive value, but to your point, in the book I went back to every seller who had been mentioned in a Bezos shareholder letter, and to another seller who had testified to legislators on Amazon’s behalf. I talked to Amazon’s allies, the examples that Amazon had used and they had all turned negative.
The sentiment in the marketplace is really mixed right now. There are a lot of sellers who feel like if you’re a Western seller collecting taxes, you’re just disadvantaged, that the advertising that we’re about to talk about has created another set of fees, and this idea in Amazon’s ads that it’s a mom and pop shop turning on the lights in the wood shop early in the morning to get the work on the American Dream, I think is a little bit of a disingenuous one. It’s a global marketplace now, there are sellers overseas in China and elsewhere that have big advantages because of different cost structures and I think it was an e-commerce guy named James Thompson, who said Jeff Bezos can’t have any idea of how messed up this is right now, and that I feel like that epitomizes it.
They have created this beast, and in a very tech company-like way, they’ve tried to create systems instead of asking people or investing time and managing them, they’ve tried to create systems to manage things like fraud and counterfeit and with some success, I think they have tamed it a little bit. But you talk to sellers and there are still a lot of complaints about how hard it is to compete, how high the fees are, and how furious the competition is from overseas sellers who sometimes are operating from a different playbook and with kind of different ethical standards.
It’s basically the Facebook of products, for better or worse.
About that OP1 meeting, this was in 2017 where — you set the scene beautifully — there’s a review for the next year, the retail group has great numbers, and Bezos is like, “What are your numbers without advertising?” and they’d actually been declining in unit profitability over time, and he really put his finger on that. It was just a really brilliant portrait of a leader who just can really hone in on an issue and drive people to a result.
What’s interesting is you, understandably for that reason, really frame it as Bezos being on top of his game, and I think you make a reference at keeping them in Day One, not letting bureaucracy overtake the company, and being accountable. The reason why I found that so interesting, is I’ve actually written this, where I feel like Amazon’s 2017 shift to focus on profitability felt like Day Two stuff. Where they started getting really focused on squeezing their suppliers, the marketplace was growing like crazy and the quality was getting much more dodgy, all these problems you had. And the customer experience was fading, it felt, a bit in importance. So when they announced the switch to one day Prime delivery, I wrote an article called Day Two to One Day; the idea was, this is the Day One Amazon that Bezos loves to rave about, it’s taking an impossible problem and saying, “No, we’re going to figure it out.”
I just thought it was so striking — we could both be right — but that that moment was framed, and I came away convinced, as a brilliant bit of management, yet my previous feeling about that shift had been largely negative.**
BS: I think here’s maybe the distinction. Jeff has one set of rules for new businesses, and another set of rules for older businesses. He is, as we know, famously tolerant of losing money for long periods of time, and investing when things aren’t working, and experimenting and trying to get it right. A great example is the Go Store, the automated checkout technologies, the Dash Cart. They have been working on that since 2011, and they’re finally actually just starting to roll that out for big grocery stores, and we’ll see how disruptive that it can be. He’s really patient and will lose and invest an extraordinary amount of money for the new stuff.
For the older stuff, seven plus years, he wants to see a different kind of operating signature. He wants those businesses to stand up on their own and show improving performance. And the retail business, which was the oldest business at Amazon and at this point in 2017, it’s 20 plus years old, what he had identified in that OP1 was that they were using advertising as a crutch, and actually the operating performance was declining. So he said, “This business is too old to be relying on other parts of the company, you got to raise your game.” And I do think that might be a little bit of a Day Two mentality, they would never kind of call it that.
Maybe Day Twos are appropriate when you’re 20 years old.
BS: That’s right! He wanted that sweet, sweet ad revenue to go into other things. Those are the investment dollars that are going to fund the real Day One stuff for Prime Video, and the robot they’re building, and the satellites they want to launch, and all sorts of other stuff. So it was a great moment, to me it was a great illustration of the tension of those OP1 meetings, and how tough they can be when the richest and maybe the smartest man in the world has his eyes on your business. And it was a way to introduce the ad business, which Amazon had been kind of working on for 10 years, and had just started to figure out.
Yeah, the ad businesses is interesting and sort of in conjunction with all this sort of stuff. Let me set some context, in The Everything Store I love how you describe — this is one of the things I’ve quoted on Stratechery before — about how Bezos started Amazon. He didn’t want to be a bookseller, rather he identified books as being the ideal product to launch a retail store on the internet. If you think about that broadly, what is Jeff Bezos? What drives him? It’s a very pragmatic attachment to tactics with a larger overarching vision of, “I want to be the ‘Everything Store’,” to your point.
Fast forward, and Bezos famously says, constantly, “The customer is number one. Customer is number one, customer is number one.” And you can understand how valuable that is in installing a culture, and that’s the leadership principles of Amazon, and it’s always in the annual letter, and all those sorts of things. But the takeaway from a lot of this is actually, the customer is not always number one. Was the customer number one when it came to the ad decision? Well, no, there was actually a measurable impact on customers, and they did it anyway because it was so profitable. Is it always number one with some of the counterfeit goods and all those sorts of things? I mean, you would definitely question that. Particularly the competitive responses, it’s like no, actually competition for Jeff Bezos is number one, that was my takeaway. He’s one of the most competitive people ever. He just wants to win, and being obsessed with customer is a means to get there, like books was a means to get there as far as becoming the everything store. Is that a fair summary?
BS: Yeah and I’m so gratified that you noticed that, I think that was an important moment. Let me just give some context. Amazon has been wandering in the woods of advertising for a decade. They’ve tried sponsored ads on the homepage or banner ads, they’ve tried ads in the search results that will take you to another website, and then they really discovered Google. They discover search ads, they call them sponsored links, they start at the bottom, then they migrate to the side, and Bezos is running tests, and when they finally moved them to the top, they realized that, one, the ads are tremendously lucrative, that brands and third-party sellers will spend a lot to get into that valuable real estate, and two, that there is a modest decrease in customer satisfaction. And he looks at this and he says, “Okay, there’s some ambiguity, this could hurt the customer. There’s some ambiguity as to how that’ll play out over the long-term. We don’t know, but it would have to be implausibly large if it’s going to outweigh this tremendous windfall that we’ll get as a result of doing that.”
And yeah, if you look at Amazon search results today, and they are not customer friendly. It’s not a taxonomy of useful links, it is basically pay-to-play, who wants to be there sprinkled with Amazon’s own brands? Those are financial decisions the company makes, and I do kind of identify that as a little bit of a turning point in the history of Amazon, and he does it because he wants that advertising money to go and be big in Hollywood, and succeed in Hollywood, and to invent new things. In some ways, customers have benefited from this, he’s sort of addicted to doing everything differently and trying new things, and the introduction to the ad business and that search ad engine was a way for him to continue to do that.
It’s really interesting, because it’s all like a morality play. Someone starts with good intentions, and they accrue power in some sort of way, and then it becomes an ‘ends justifies the means’ bit. You wrote this in the context of advertising where Bezos justified it because the money would be used for invention, right? And to me, that was such a striking observation on your part, because it seemed like — you talked about the Hollywood rules of a story, that seemed like a Hollywood story. You get powerful and you start telling yourself that you’re doing it for good reasons, and those good reasons just happen to perfectly align with what you kind of want to do, period.
BS: Right. And let’s just say though, if it is a morality play, we should probably consider the very last act. Jeff seems to be kind of drifting away from the company. He’s had the personal scandal, HQ2, they’ll never admit it, was kind of a disaster. They have all this regulatory scrutiny, and then the pandemic hits —
I just want to say on HQ2, I predicted Raleigh, and then it never came up later. I was so gratified to see that Raleigh was actually on the final three and the original proposal, that made my day when I read that.
BS: And by the way, for folks who haven’t picked up the book yet, I’ve got the internal HQ2 documents that show what the original HQ2 committee recommended to the S-team. And it turns out it was Raleigh, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Then, and it’s funny because I think the real critics of that process were sort of right at the time, that this was a little bit of a cynical decision and the S-team overrode the HQ2 team and said we’re going to go to DC and New York, and they had other reasons to do it. But yes, Raleigh made the final cut.
It was just gratifying. Because at the time I thought, “Wow, I was really off on that”. It’s, no, actually I did have the thought process sort of generally right.
BS: Right. Just to finish my thought, I was going to say that he seems to be drifting away and into different worlds, and then during the pandemic, he comes back and applies his intellect to helping to solve the intractable problems of how to operate a fulfillment network during period of COVID-19. So there is an arc there, and I’m glad you saw it and now of course, he’s resigning a CEO. So that that’ll be interesting as well.
Well, I thought the pandemic chapter was really good. And the sense I got from you, and perhaps I’m biased because this is my feeling about it, is that Amazon got a bit of a raw deal as far as coverage goes. At the end of the day, they probably more than any other company carried the United States in particular through the pandemic in a way it could have gone far worse but for Amazon. Whether that be AWS, whether that be their delivery network, just the fact that they were there and they had the capability of supporting folks. And that by definition meant that they there’s going to be a lot of people put in danger.
I thought your reporting that they were very proactive, much more I think than has been reported previously, in trying to minimize and keep people as safe as possible, despite the fact that they’re in an impossible circumstance, I thought reflected quite well on Amazon. I was gratified because I wrote when Bezos’ retired, I wrote that the last year has really proven the value of Amazon, and it’s been sort of a heroic effort. And a lot of people, I got a lot of feedback on that. people were very upset about it. But I thought that your chapter validated that point of view.
BS: I think that there are really good reasons to critique Amazon, but the critiques have to be grounded in the facts, and you have to give the company credit where it deserves it. Amazon made mistakes during the pandemic. Some of those mistakes were a function of the initial confusion and shifting guidance from the CDC and other authorities. Three feet versus six feet, masks, thermometers, what to do in the break rooms, et cetera. There was a fair amount of chaos and some of it was just a function of the time, March of 2020, I think in particular.
But in reporting the story, I went to some of the very independent scientific advisors that Amazon recruited to help them, like Ian Lipkin, the Columbia epidemiologist. And they all uniformly said that they were impressed that Amazon was willing to invest, that they made hard decisions and that they implemented what was recommended to them. There are areas for critique. The way that they dismissed or fired some of the advocates among their employees, particularly the two climate advocates, some of the workers in the Staten Island fulfillment center and elsewhere who agitated for more protection or changes. Yeah, maybe those workers and climate advocates didn’t cover themselves with glory in how they conducted themselves, but Amazon firing them just sort of smells funny. I quote Tim Bray, the former Amazon principled engineer, talking about a little bit about that, that there’s something in the DNA of the company that just doesn’t accommodate internal dissension. I mean, Google feels like a college campus sometimes for the number of internal protests.
Well, you want to go back to a founding story…
BS: (laughs) Right. And Amazon, they just don’t do that. Look, I mean it’s not a hagiography by any means, I don’t think either of the books are. But I also didn’t set out to write a critique, and I wanted to follow the facts and when it came to the pandemic, it was a lifeline for a lot of folks and customers. They didn’t do everything right, but in the eyes of some of the experts who looked at it, and when you compare them to other retailers who often aren’t held to the same standards, I think you just made that point. We are hard on Amazon, because it’s so prominent. You have to give them credit for doing a pretty good job.
It’s funny you mentioned it’s not a hagiography, this or the last book, it leads to my last point. I mean, you tease the Lauren Sánchez story throughout the book, and it was the subject of the excerpt in Bloomberg, I get that it’s a big attraction. But I go back to The Everything Store, at the very end you write about Bezos being dropped off for work by his wife. It’s this very charming ending, he’s a family man that’s just devoted to this company. And in Amazon Unbound, when you get to the scandal you talk about how so many employees were disappointed in Bezos after that happened. I kind of got the sense you were disappointed too.
BS: No, I was surprised, I think I was as surprised as anyone. When you cover Amazon and you’ve written a book about it, and you’re writing another book about it, you want to consider yourself somewhat well-informed. My jaw fell just about as far as anyone’s when he tweeted the divorce, and then when you saw the National Enquirer story a couple of days after that. I mean personally people grow and evolve and grow apart and I actually think we really don’t know and can’t know what happens in a marriage, but there’s some peculiar things about the story. He never seemed to be really conducting the relationship in secret, which was part of the reason why the National Enquirer exploited it, So I don’t think we know that aspect of it. I don’t care one way or another personally what he does with his private life. If anything, when I got over my astonishment, I realized that my tidy little business book was going to have a much more interesting avenue to go down.
That’s actually interesting, because I saved this question for the last, in part because I felt like I had to ask it. My point is, I don’t really care, right? I’m a business writer, I’m fascinated with Amazon the company. And I’m curious, did you feel pressure from your editors to keep hinting at it, and again, the fact that Bloomberg excerpted that particular bit, it’s clearly juicy, right?
BS: Yeah, and look, other excerpts are coming. But no, to be fair, you try in a book excerpt to entice readers.
Right, it’s enticing, yeah.
BS: But, no pressure. Like all journalists, I gravitate to good stories and lively anecdotes, and I wasn’t sure how much I would do on that in the book. Then you get into the hall of mirrors of personalities, and characters, and betrayals, and obfuscation, and international intrigue that is the Bezos-AMI saga and it’s enormously juicy. So in the end of course, I thought, “You know what? This is its own chapter.” And in reporting it I realized that it had informed a little bit the HQ2 saga. That the helipads were probably — Amazon disputes this — but probably tied to Jeff and Lauren and their interest in helicopters. There’s Blue Origin and how Lauren’s company was creating videos and Blue Origin employees were astonished by Jeff’s changes and the interest in doing a Super Bowl ad, where I realized that the personal saga had cast a little bit of a specter over the other parts, and that it was an interesting way to kind of tell the tale. And look, I want to sell books.
Well, famously after the first book, MacKenzie, [Bezos’s then-wife], attacked you for it, which is, I mean, I guess I could understand the point of view even though the book, I thought it was quite accurate, and by virtue of being accurate, reflected well on Amazon, I mean it is an incredible company. This one, I think it’s interesting, as I mentioned how it’s diverged. My great hope personally is, I know you mentioned that you tried to get Bezos, they hemmed and hawed, you were never actually able to interview him, is I’m hoping for a trilogy-
BS: Oh, God.
He finally sits down with you and you write the biography. I think that’s the front to end of everything. So I look forward to reading that in a decade or two.
BS: Well, Jeff, if you’re listening, Ben has some advice. Call me up.
(laughs) Very good, Brad. This is a great book, just like the first one, and congratulations on getting it done. I’m terrified of writing a book. But everyone should go, it’s available now, everyone should go buy it.
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