Recently, the Atlantic published a cover story on Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, with a worth anywhere between $112 billion to $137 billion (it varies). The gist wasn’t so much Bezos’ money but how his use of it has made him the most powerful man in American culture.
The scary part isn’t so much the money part but how Bezos’ Amazon.com controls so much. Although the reporter wanted to know what makes the 55-year-old behind it all tick, he didn’t talk about Bezos’ spiritual-moral-ethical side at all or whether he even has one.
In the past, Bezos has sold himself as a values kind of guy, enjoying breakfasts with his family, doing the dishes every night and never scheduling work sessions before 10 a.m. according to this 2018 Wall Street Journal report that was based on a YouTube video (see above). At the time that story ran, Bezos’ extramarital affair was in full flower and one wonders if the tech exec was simply lying when he spoke about his supposedly serene domestic life.
Back to the Atlantic piece:
Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. 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. 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.
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. 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. …
Since that time, Bezos’s reach has only grown. To the U.S. president, he is a nemesis. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance.
The story then sketches out a Brave New Worldesque kind of control that the Amazon founder will soon have over us all in an era when it and Google, Facebook and Apple have become the new robber barons of our age, monopolizing vast portions of the American economy.
His creation is less a company than an encompassing system. If it were merely a store that sold practically all salable goods — and delivered them within 48 hours — it would still be the most awe-inspiring creation in the history of American business. But Amazon is both that tangible company and an abstraction far more powerful. …
At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases, it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs. With its logistics business — and its growing network of trucks and planes — it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.
Astoundingly, the story skims over Bezos’ biggest mistake: His failure to keep his pants zipped and the ensuing disgrace that revealed his junior-high level obsession with photographs of his genitals that somehow made their way into the offices of the National Enquirer.
Sure, he may be the world’s richest man, but his marriage was destroyed and his children may never forgive him for it. We will probably never know what is going on in that family.
The New York Times suggested that Bezos’ morality went downhill after he “went to Hollywood.”
There have been efforts at digging up the religious beliefs of Bezos and his now-former wife, MacKenzie. The best effort is from insider.com, but even the deputy editor of investigations found slim pickings. The best he could come up with was that MacKenzie Bezos had been brought up Catholic. As for Jeff Bezos, hard to say.
The closest Bezos has gotten — in the media –- to God is a January 2016 cover of international version of Forbes magazine showing Bezos as Lord Vishnu, the Hindu deity.
Medium, the website that Bezos used to announce extortion efforts against him, suggests that the many stories out there about Bezos as a family man are basically fantasies cooked up by publicists.
The Atlantic article doesn’t touch on any of this, which is odd.
Instead it goes on and on about his science fiction dreams of settling other planets, even though anyone with a clue about terraforming outer space knows that only a tiny wedge of humans could ever go on such adventures. The bulk of the 7 billion of us are stuck here.
It does talk about Donald Graham’s search for a new owner for the Washington Post after Graham himself was set to retire. A breakfast with business magnate Warren Buffet revealed that Buffett thought Bezos would be the best choice.
Graham set out to better understand Bezos’s ideological predilections. “I did a primitive Google search and found nothing, as close to nothing for somebody with that kind of wealth. I didn’t know what his politics were,” he told me. This blankness suggested to Graham the stuff of an ideal newspaper owner.
In the above video, Bezos talks about spending some his billions for charity but he does not mention one religious group. The sheer absence of any belief — or its atheist opposite — makes Bezos an unusual person among most Americans, who at least believe in God.
So while Amazon is trusted, no countervailing force has the inclination or capacity to restrain it. And while power could amass in a more villainous character than Jeff Bezos, that doesn’t alleviate the anxiety that accompanies such concentration. Amazon might be a vast corporation, with more than 600,000 employees, but it is also the extension of one brilliant, willful man with an incredible knack for bending the world to his values.
Again, what are those values? The sleazy facts we know about the divorce suggests he doesn’t have the values that the public had been told that he had.
There’s been lots of discussions in the past as to whether a politician with an unethical private life can be an effective public servant. There are discussions about that regarding President Donald Trump all the time. Does this hold true for the rest of us: That he or she who cannot control their private appetites can’t be prudent in public?
The Atlantic should have at least posed that question. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, don’t you think?
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