2019.11 技术 杰夫-贝索斯的总体规划

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TECHNOLOGY
JEFF BEZOS’S MASTER PLAN
What the Amazon founder and CEO wants for his empire and himself, and what that means for the rest of us.

By Franklin Foer
NOVEMBER 2019 ISSUE
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where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.


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At 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. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

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.


I first grew concerned about Amazon’s power five years ago. 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. When the conglomerate Hachette, with which I’d once published a book, refused to accede to Amazon’s demands, it was punished. Amazon delayed shipments of Hachette books; when consumers searched for some Hachette titles, it redirected them to similar books from other publishers. 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.

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. 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.

Bezos worries that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. “We have to go to space to save Earth,” he says.
Bezos’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. 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. Yet he largely keeps his intentions to himself; many longtime colleagues can’t recall him ever expressing a political opinion. To replay a loop of his interviews from Amazon’s quarter century of existence is to listen to him retell the same unrevealing anecdotes over and over.


To better understand him, I spent five months speaking with current and former Amazon executives, as well as people at the company’s rivals and scholarly observers. Bezos himself declined to participate in this story, and current employees would speak to me only off the record. Even former staffers largely preferred to remain anonymous, assuming that they might eventually wish to work for a business somehow entwined with Bezos’s sprawling concerns.

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From November 2018: Alexa, should we trust you?

In the course of these conversations, my view of Bezos began to shift. Many of my assumptions about the man melted away; admiration jostled with continued unease. And I was left with a new sense of his endgame.

Bezos loves the word relentless—it appears again and again in his closely read annual letters to shareholders—and I had always assumed that his aim was domination for its own sake. In an era that celebrates corporate gigantism, he seemed determined to be the biggest of them all. But to say that Bezos’s ultimate goal is dominion over the planet is to misunderstand him. His ambitions are not bound by the gravitational pull of the Earth.

Before bezos settled on Amazon.com, he toyed with naming his unlaunched store MakeItSo.com. He entertained using the phrase because he couldn’t contain a long-standing enthusiasm. The rejected moniker was a favored utterance of a man Bezos idolizes: the captain of the starship USS Enterprise-D, Jean-Luc Picard.

Bezos is unabashed in his fanaticism for Star Trek and its many spin-offs. He has a holding company called Zefram, which honors the character who invented warp drive. He persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official. He named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate. As time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique. A friend once said that Bezos adopted his strenuous fitness regimen in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”

Most mortals eventually jettison teenage dreams, but Bezos remains passionately committed to his, even as he has come to control more and more of the here and now. Critics have chided him for philanthropic stinginess, at least relative to his wealth, but the thing Bezos considers his primary humanitarian contribution isn’t properly charitable. It’s a profit-seeking company called Blue Origin, dedicated to fulfilling the prophecy of his high-school graduation speech. He funds that venture—which builds rockets, rovers, and the infrastructure that permits voyage beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year. More than his ownership of his behemoth company or of The Washington Post—and more than the $2 billion he’s pledged to nonprofits working on homelessness and education for low-income Americans—Bezos calls Blue Origin his “most important work.”

He considers the work so important because the threat it aims to counter is so grave. What worries Bezos is that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. The danger, he says, “is not necessarily extinction,” but stasis: “We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future.” While others might fret that climate change will soon make the planet uninhabitable, the billionaire wrings his hands over the prospects of diminished growth. But the scenario he describes is indeed grim. Without enough energy to go around, rationing and starvation will ensue. Over the years, Bezos has made himself inaccessible to journalists asking questions about Amazon. But he shares his faith in space colonization with a preacher’s zeal: “We have to go to space to save Earth.”

At the heart of this faith is a text Bezos read as a teen. In 1976, a Princeton physicist named Gerard K. O’Neill wrote a populist case for moving into space called The High Frontier, a book beloved by sci-fi geeks, NASA functionaries, and aging hippies. As a Princeton student, Bezos attended O’Neill seminars and ran the campus chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Through Blue Origin, Bezos is developing detailed plans for realizing O’Neill’s vision.

The professor imagined colonies housed in miles-long cylindrical tubes floating between Earth and the moon. The tubes would sustain a simulacrum of life back on the mother planet, with soil, oxygenated air, free-flying birds, and “beaches lapped by waves.” When Bezos describes these colonies—and presents artists’ renderings of them—he sounds almost rapturous. “This is Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes.” Since the colonies would allow the human population to grow without any earthly constraints, the species would flourish like never before: “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.”

Bezos rallies the public with passionate peroration and convincing command of detail. Yet a human hole remains in his presentation. Who will govern this new world? Who will write its laws? Who will decide which earthlings are admitted into the colonies? These questions aren’t explicitly answered, except with his fervent belief that entrepreneurs, those in his own image, will shape the future. And he will do his best to make it so. With his wealth, and the megaphone that it permits him, Bezos is attempting to set the terms for the future of the species, so that his utopia can take root.

In a way, Bezos has already created a prototype of a cylindrical tube inhabited by millions, and it’s called Amazon.com. 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.

Bezos’s enterprise upends long-held precepts about the fundamental nature of capitalism—especially an idea enshrined by the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. As World War II drew to its close, Hayek wrote the essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a seminal indictment of centralized planning. Hayek argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society. When markets collectively set a price, that price reflects the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Any governmental attempt to replace this organic apparatus—to set prices unilaterally, or even to understand the disparate workings of an economy—is pure hubris.

In contrast to the dysfunction and cynicism that define the times, Amazon is the embodiment of competence, the rare institution that routinely works.
Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. 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.

Read: Jeff Bezos’s $150 billion fortune is a policy failure

What makes Amazon so fearsome to its critics isn’t purely its size but its trajectory. Amazon’s cache of knowledge gives it the capacity to build its own winning version of an astonishing array of businesses. In the face of its growth, long-dormant fears of monopoly have begun to surface—and Amazon has reportedly found itself under review by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. But unlike Facebook, another object of government scrutiny, Bezos’s company remains deeply trusted by the public. A 2018 poll sponsored by Georgetown University and the Knight Foundation found that Amazon engendered greater confidence than virtually any other American institution. Despite Donald Trump’s jabs at Bezos, this widespread faith in the company makes for a source of bipartisan consensus, although the Democrats surveyed were a touch more enthusiastic than the Republicans were: They rated Amazon even more trustworthy than the U.S. military. In contrast to the dysfunction and cynicism that define the times, Amazon is the embodiment of competence, the rare institution that routinely works.

All of this confidence in Bezos’s company has made him a singular figure in the culture, which, at times, regards him as a flesh-and-blood Picard. If “Democracy dies in darkness”—the motto of the Bezos-era Washington Post—then he is the rescuer of the light, the hero who reversed the terminal decline of Woodward and Bernstein’s old broadsheet. When he wrote a Medium post alleging that the National Enquirer had attempted to extort him, he was hailed for taking a stand against tabloid sleaze and cyberbullying.

As Amazon has matured, it has assumed the trappings of something more than a private enterprise. It increasingly poses as a social institution tending to the common good. After it earned derision for the alleged treatment of its workers—some warehouse employees reported feeling pressured to forgo bathroom breaks to meet productivity targets, to cite just one example—it unilaterally raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in the U.S., then attempted to shame competitors that didn’t follow suit. (Amazon says that employees are allowed to use the bathroom whenever they want.) As technology has reshaped its workforce, Amazon has set aside $700 million to retrain about a third of its U.S. employees for roles with new demands.

These gestures are partly gambits to insulate the company’s reputation from accusations of rapaciousness. But they also tie Amazon to an older conception of the corporation. In its current form, Amazon harkens back to Big Business as it emerged in the postwar years. When Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, was nominated to be secretary of defense in 1953, he famously told a Senate confirmation panel, “I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” For the most part, this was an aphorism earnestly accepted as a statement of good faith. To avert class warfare, the Goliaths of the day recognized unions; they bestowed health care and pensions upon employees. Liberal eminences such as John K. Galbraith hailed the corporation as the basis for a benign social order. Galbraith extolled the social utility of the corporation because he believed that it could be domesticated and harnessed to serve interests other than its own bottom line. He believed businesses behave beneficently when their self-serving impulses are checked by “countervailing power” in the form of organized labor and government.

Of course, those powers have receded. Unions, whose organizing efforts Amazon has routinely squashed, are an unassuming nub of their former selves; the regulatory state is badly out of practice. 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.

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after jackie bezos’s shotgun marriage to a member of a traveling unicyclist troupe dissolved, she dedicated herself to their only progeny. The teenage mother from Albuquerque became her son’s intellectual champion. She would drive him 40 miles each day so that he could attend an elementary school for high-testing kids in Houston. When a wait list prevented him from entering the gifted track in middle school, she wheedled bureaucrats until they made an exception. Over the course of Bezos’s itinerant childhood, as his family traversed the Sun Belt of the ’70s, Jackie encouraged her son’s interest in tinkering by constantly shuttling him to RadioShack.

“I have always been academically smart,” Bezos told an audience in Washington, D.C., last year. This was a sentiment ratified by the world as he ascended the meritocracy. At Princeton, he flirted with becoming a theoretical physicist. On Wall Street, he joined D. E. Shaw, arguably the brainiest and most adventurous hedge fund of the ’90s. The firm would send unsolicited letters to dean’s-list students at top universities, telling them: “We approach our recruiting in unapologetically elitist fashion.”

The computer scientist who founded the firm, David E. Shaw, had dabbled in the nascent internet in the ’80s. This provided him with unusual clarity about the coming revolution and its commercial implications. He anointed Bezos to seek out investment opportunities in the newly privatized medium—an exploration that led Bezos to his own big idea.

When Bezos created Amazon in 1994, he set out to build an institution like the ones that had carried him through the first three decades of his life. He would build his own aristocracy of brains, a place where intelligence would rise to the top. Early on, Bezos asked job candidates for their SAT scores. The company’s fifth employee, Nicholas Lovejoy, later told Wired that interviews would take the form of a Socratic test. Bezos would probe logical acuity with questions like Why are manhole covers round? According to Lovejoy, “One of his mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving.” When Bezos thought about talent, in other words, he was self-consciously in a Darwinian mode.

Read: The world wants less tech. Amazon gives it more

By the logic of natural selection, it was hardly obvious that a bookstore would become the dominant firm in the digital economy. From Amazon’s infancy, Bezos mastered the art of coyly deflecting questions about where he intended to take his company. But back in his hedge-fund days, he had kicked around the idea of an “everything store” with Shaw. And he always conveyed the impression of having grand plans—a belief that the fiction aisle and the self-help section might serve as the trailhead to commanding heights.

In the vernacular, Amazon is often lumped together with Silicon Valley. At its spiritual center, however, Amazon is a retailer, not a tech company. Amazon needed to elbow its way into a tightly packed and unforgiving industry, where it faced entrenched entities such as Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and Target. In mass-market retail, the company with the thinnest margin usually prevails, and a soft December can ruin a year. Even as Bezos prided himself on his capacity for thinking far into the future, he also had to worry about the prospect of tomorrow’s collapse. At tightfisted Amazon, there were no big bonuses at year’s end, no business-class flights for executives on long hauls, no employee kitchens overflowing with protein bars.

Bezos was hardly a mellow leader, especially in the company’s early days. To mold his organization in his image, he often lashed out at those who failed to meet his high standards. The journalist Brad Stone’s indispensable book about the company, The Everything Store, contains a list of Bezos’s cutting remarks: “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A-team document?” “Why are you ruining my life?” (Amazon says this account is not reflective of Bezos’s leadership style.) This was the sarcastic, demeaning version of his endless questioning. But Bezos’s waspish intelligence and attention to detail—his invariable focus on a footnote or an appendix—elicited admiration alongside the dread. “If you’re going in for a Bezos meeting, you’re preparing as if the world is going to end,” a former executive told me. “You’re like, I’ve been preparing for the last three weeks. I’ve asked every damn person that I know to think of questions that could be asked. Then Bezos will ask you the one question you hadn’t considered.”

The growth of the company—which already brought in nearly $3 billion in revenue in its seventh year of existence—prodded Bezos to adapt his methods. He created a new position, technical adviser, to instill his views in top managers; the technical advisers would shadow the master for at least a year, and emerge as what executives jokingly refer to as “Jeff-bots.” His managerial style, which had been highly personal, was codified in systems and procedures. These allowed him to scale his presence so that even if he wasn’t sitting in a meeting, his gestalt would be there.

In 2002, Amazon distilled Bezos’s sensibility into a set of Leadership Principles, a collection of maxims including “Invent and Simplify,” “Bias for Action,” and “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” To an outside ear, these sound too hokey to be the basis for fervent belief. But Amazonians, as employees call themselves, swear by them. The principles, now 14 in number, are the subject of questions asked in job interviews; they are taught in orientations; they are the qualities on which employees are judged in performance reviews.


Jeff Bezos in Seattle in 1998. It was hardly obvious that a bookstore would become the dominant firm in the digital economy, but Bezos always believed that the fiction aisle might serve as the trailhead to commanding heights. (Rex Rystedt / Life Images Collection / Getty)
Of all the principles, perhaps the most sacrosanct is “Customer Obsession”—the commandment to make decisions only with an eye toward pleasing the consumer, rather than fixating on competitors—a pillar of faith illustrated by the Great Lube Scandal. About 10 years ago, Bezos became aware that Amazon was sending emails to customers suggesting the purchase of lubricants. This fact made him apoplectic. If such an email arrived at work, a boss might glimpse it. If it arrived at home, a child might pose uncomfortable questions. Bezos ordered the problem solved and threatened to shut down Amazon’s email promotions in their entirety if it wasn’t. Kristi Coulter, who served as the head of worldwide editorial and site merchandising, led a group that spent weeks compiling a list of verboten products, which Bezos’s top deputies then reviewed. She told me, “It wasn’t just, like, hemorrhoid cream, or lube, it was hair color, any kind of retinol. They were so conservative about what they thought would be embarrassing. Even tooth-whitening stuff, they were like, ‘No. That could be embarrassing.’ ”

To climb Amazon’s organizational chart is to aspire to join the inner sanctum at the very peak, called the S-Team (“the senior team”). These are the 17 executives who assemble regularly with Bezos to debate the company’s weightiest decisions. Bezos treats the S-Team with familial affection; its members come closest to being able to read his mind. The group has absorbed the Bezos method and applies it to the corners of the company that he can’t possibly touch. According to James Thomson, a manager who helped build Amazon Marketplace, where anyone can sell new or used goods through the website, “At most companies, executives like to show how much they know. At Amazon, the focus is on asking the right question. Leadership is trained to poke holes in data.”

Once an executive makes it to the S-Team, he remains on the S-Team. The stability of the unit undoubtedly provides Bezos a measure of comfort, but it also calcifies this uppermost echelon in an antiquated vision of diversity. The S‑Team has no African Americans; the only woman runs human resources. Nor does the composition of leadership change much a step down the ladder. When CNBC examined the 48 executives who run Amazon’s core businesses (including retail, cloud, and hardware), it found only four women.

One former team leader, who is a person of color, told me that when top executives hear the word diversity, they interpret it to mean “the lowering of standards.” “It’s this classic libertarian thinking,” Coulter told me. “They think Amazon is a meritocracy based on data, but who’s deciding what gets counted and who gets to avail themselves of the opportunity? If VP meetings are scheduled at 7 a.m., how many mothers can manage that?”

(Amazon disputes the methodology CNBC used to tally women in its senior leadership ranks. “There are dozens of female executives that play a critical role in Amazon’s success,” a spokesman told me in an email. He cited the company’s generous parental-leave policy, a commitment to flexible scheduling, and the fact that more than 40 percent of its global workforce is female as evidence of its pursuit of gender equity. He also said that its Leadership Principles insist that employees “seek diverse perspectives.”)

The meritocrat’s blind spot is that he considers his place in the world well earned by dint of intelligence and hard work. This belief short-circuits his capacity to truly listen to critics. When confronted about the composition of the S-Team in a company-wide meeting two years ago, Bezos seemed to dismiss the urgency of the complaint. According to CNBC, he said that he expected “any transition there to happen very incrementally over a long period of time.” The latest addition to the group, made this year, was another white male.

Bezos built his organization to be an anti-bureaucracy. To counter the tendency of groups to bloat, he instituted something called “two-pizza teams.” (Like Bezos’s other managerial innovations, this sounds like a gimmick, except that advanced engineers and economists with doctorates accept it as the organizing principle of their professional lives.) According to the theory, teams at Amazon should ideally be small enough to be fed with two pizzas.

In its warehouses, Amazon has used video games to motivate workers—the games, with names like MissionRacer, track output and pit workers against one another, prodding them to move faster. The two-pizza teams represent a more subtle, white-collar version of this gamification. The small teams instill a sense of ownership over projects. But employees placed on such small teams can also experience a greater fear of failure, because there’s no larger group in which to hide or to more widely distribute blame.

Amazon has a raft of procedures to guide its disparate teams. Bezos insists that plans be pitched in six-page memos, written in full sentences, a form he describes as “narrative.” This practice emerged from a sense that PowerPoint had become a tool for disguising fuzzy thinking. Writing, Bezos surmised, demands a more linear type of reasoning. As John Rossman, an alumnus of the company who wrote a book called Think Like Amazon, described it, “If you can’t write it out, then you’re not ready to defend it.” The six-pagers are consumed at the beginning of meetings in what Bezos has called a “study hall” atmosphere. This ensures that the audience isn’t faking its way through the meeting either. Only after the silent digestion of the memo—which can be an anxiety-inducing stretch for its authors—can the group ask questions about the document.


Taylor Hill / Getty
Most teams at Amazon are hermetic entities; required expertise is embedded in each group. Take Amazon’s robust collection of economists with doctorates. In the past several years, the company has hired more than 150 of them, which makes Amazon a far larger employer of economists than any university in the country. Tech companies such as Microsoft and Uber have also hired economists, although not as many. And while other companies have tended to keep them in centralized units, often working on forecasting or policy issues, Amazon takes a different approach. It distributes economists across a range of teams, where they can, among other things, run controlled experiments that permit scientific, and therefore effective, manipulation of consumer behavior.

Relentless might be the most Amazonian word, but Bezos also talks about the virtues of wandering. “Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders this year. When I spoke with workers based at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, they said what they appreciated most about their employer was the sense of intellectual autonomy it allowed. Once they had clearly articulated a mission in an approved six-pager, they typically had wide latitude to make it happen, without having to fight through multiple layers of approval. The wandering mentality has also helped Amazon continually expand into adjacent businesses—or businesses that seem, at first, unrelated. Assisted by the ever growing consumer and supplier data it collects, and the insights into human needs and human behavior it is constantly uncovering, the company keeps finding new opportunities for growth.

Read: When Amazon went from big to unbelievably big

What is Amazon, aside from a listing on Nasdaq? This is a flummoxing question. The company is named for the world’s most voluminous river, but it also has tributaries shooting out in all directions. Retailer hardly captures the company now that it’s also a movie studio, an artificial-intelligence developer, a device manufacturer, and a web-services provider. But to describe it as a conglomerate isn’t quite right either, given that so many of its businesses are tightly integrated or eventually will be. When I posed the question to Amazonians, I got the sense that they considered the company to be a paradigm—a distinctive approach to making decisions, a set of values, the Jeff Bezos view of the world extended through some 600,000 employees. This description, of course, means that the company’s expansion has no natural boundary; no sector of the economy inherently lies beyond its core competencies.

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in late 2012, Donald Graham prepared to sell his inheritance, The Washington Post. He wanted to hand the paper over to someone with pockets deep enough to hold steady through the next recession; he wanted someone techie enough to complete the paper’s digital transition; above all, he wanted someone who grasped the deeper meaning of stewardship. Graham came up with a shortlist of ideal owners he would pursue, including the financier David M. Rubenstein, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Bezos.

The last of the names especially enticed Graham. That January, he had breakfast with his friend and adviser Warren Buffett, who also happened to be a shareholder in the Post. Buffett mentioned that he considered Bezos the “best CEO in the United States”—hardly an unconventional opinion, but Graham had never heard it from Buffett before. After the breakfast, 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.

Graham dispatched an emissary to make the pitch. It was a polite but hardly promising conversation: Bezos didn’t rule out the possibility of bidding for the Post, but he didn’t display any palpable enthusiasm, either. The fact that he dropped the subject for several months seemed the best gauge of his interest. While Bezos ghosted Graham, Omidyar, the most enthusiastic of the bidders, continued to seek the prize.

Bezos’s past pronouncements may not have revealed partisanship, but they did suggest little appetite for stodgy institutionalism. Like so many CEOs of the era, Bezos figured himself an instrument of creative destruction, with little sympathy for the destroyed. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. He was critiquing New York book publishers, whose power Amazon had aimed to diminish. But he harbored a similarly dim view of self-satisfied old-media institutions that attempted to preserve their cultural authority.

It therefore came as a surprise when, after months of silence, Bezos sent a three-sentence email expressing interest in the Post. Graham made plans to lunch with Bezos in Sun Valley, Idaho, where they would both be attending Allen & Company’s summer conference. Over sandwiches that Graham brought back to his rental, the old proprietor made his preferred buyer a counterintuitive pitch: He explained all the reasons owning a newspaper was hard. He wanted Bezos to know that a newspaper was a self-defeating vehicle for promoting business interests or any preferred agenda. The conversation was a tutorial in the responsibilities of the elite, from a distinguished practitioner.

Graham didn’t need to plead with Bezos. In Sun Valley, they hardly haggled over terms. “We had brunch twice, and at the end we shook hands, unlike almost any deal I’ve ever made in business,” Graham told me. The man who decried gatekeepers was suddenly the keeper of one of the nation’s most important gates.

Buying the Post was not a financially momentous event in the life of Jeff Bezos. In addition to the billions in Amazon stock he owned, he had quietly invested in Google and Uber in their infancy. The Bezos imprimatur, the young companies had understood, would burnish their chances with any other would-be investor. (Uber’s initial public offering alone earned him an estimated $400 million earlier this year, far more than he paid for the Post in 2013.)

But the purchase was a turning point in Bezos’s reputational history—and realigned his sense of place in the world. On the eve of the acquisition, Amazon’s relationship with New York publishing was contentious. The friendly guy who professed his love of Kazuo Ishiguro novels and had created a cool new way to buy books was now seen in some quarters as an enemy of literary culture and a successor to the monopolist Rockefeller. Not long before the acquisition, he had written a memo, obtained by Brad Stone, titled “Amazon.love,” asking the S-Team to ponder how the company could avoid becoming as feared as Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft. Although he never justified the purchase of the Post as a response to his anxieties about Amazon’s image—and, of course, his own—the question must have been on his mind as he considered the opportunity. To save a civically minded institution like the Post was a chance to stake a different legacy for himself.

Read: I delivered packages for Amazon and it was a nightmare

Bezos keeps the Post structurally separate from Amazon—his family office monitors the business of the paper—but he runs it in the same expansionist spirit as he does his company. He vowed to put every dollar of profit back into the enterprise. In the six years of his ownership, the Post newsroom has grown from 500 to just over 850.

Despite his investments in the institution, Bezos’s transition to Washington, D.C., was halting and awkward. It took him several months to visit the Post newsroom and try to allay rank-and-file nervousness about the intentions of the new owner. When the Post’s great editor Ben Bradlee died several months into his regime, he decided to attend the funeral only after Bob Woodward explained its spiritual significance. His attachment to the paper didn’t seem to acquire emotional depth until he sent his jet to retrieve the reporter Jason Rezaian from Iran, where he’d been imprisoned for 18 months, and personally accompanied him home. The press hailed Bezos for displaying such a strong interest in the fate of his reporter, a taste of how media extol those they regard as their own saviors.

It may have taken him a moment to realize that Washington would be a new center of his life, but once he did, he rushed to implant himself there. In 2016, he paid $23 million to buy the site of a former museum just down the block from Woodrow Wilson’s old home. The museum had joined together two mansions, one of which had been designed by John Russell Pope, the architect of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. Bezos kept one of the buildings as his residential quarters and set about renovating the other for the sake of socializing, a space that seemed to self-consciously recall Katharine Graham’s old salon, except with geothermal heat. Washingtonian magazine, which obtained Bezos’s blueprints, predicted that, once complete, it will become “a veritable Death Star of Washington entertaining.”

While bezos made himself at home in Washington, so did his company, but on its own terms. The Obama years were a boom time for Big Tech. Executives regularly shuffled through the White House. Visitor logs record that no American company visited more often than Google. Silicon Valley hurled itself into policy debates with its characteristic pretense of idealism, even as it began to hire Brioni-clad influence peddlers. It was, by its own account, battling for nothing less than the future of the free internet, a fight to preserve net neutrality and prevent greedy telecoms from choking the liberatory promise of the new medium.

As the tech companies invested heavily in policy, Amazon would occasionally cheer them on and join their coalitions. But mostly it struck a pose of indifference. Amazon didn’t spend as much on lobbyists as most of its Big Tech brethren did, at least not until the late Obama years. Amazon seemed less concerned about setting policy than securing lucrative contracts. It approached government as another customer to be obsessed over.

Given the way Democrats now bludgeon Big Tech, it’s hard to remember how warmly Barack Obama embraced the industry, and how kindly Big Tech reciprocated with campaign donations. But there was a less visible reason for the alliance: As the debacle of healthcare.gov graphically illustrated, Obama badly needed a geek squad. He installed the nation’s first-ever chief technology officer, and the administration began to importune the federal bureaucracy to upload itself to the cloud, a move it promised would save money and more effectively secure sensitive material.


Bezos visits the Washington Post newsroom in 2016. The purchase of the paper was a turning point in his reputational history, a chance to stake a legacy for himself as a defender of a civically minded institution. (Bill O’Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)
Cloud First was the official name of the policy. Amazon had nothing to do with its inception, but it stood to make billions from it. It had wandered into the cloud-computing business long before its rivals. Amazon Web Services is, at its most elemental, a constellation of server farms around the world, which it rents at low cost as highly secure receptacles for data. Apple, the messaging platform Slack, and scores of start-ups all reside on AWS.

If retail was a maddeningly low-margin business, AWS was closer to pure profit. And Amazon had the field to itself. “We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. It’s unbelievable,” Bezos boasted last year. AWS is such a dominant player that even Amazon’s competitors, including Netflix, house data with it—although Walmart resolutely refuses, citing anxieties about placing its precious secrets on its competitor’s servers. Walmart is more suspicious than the intelligence community: In 2013, the CIA agreed to spend $600 million to place its data in Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.
Other Big Tech companies have fretted about the morality of becoming entangled with the national-security state. But Bezos has never expressed such reservations. His grandfather developed missile-defense systems for the Pentagon and supervised nuclear labs. Bezos grew up steeped in the romance of the Space Age, a time when Big Business and Big Government linked arms to achieve great national goals. Besides, to be trusted with the secrets of America’s most secretive agency gave Amazon a talking point that it could take into any sales pitch—the credentials that would recommend it to any other government buyer.


One of Amazon’s great strengths is its capacity to learn, and it eventually acclimated itself to the older byways of Washington clientelism, adding three former congressmen to its roster of lobbyists. (Amazon’s spending on lobbying has increased by almost 470 percent since 2012.) It also began to hire officials as they stepped out of their agencies. When the Obama administration’s top procurement officer, Anne Rung, left her post, she headed straight to Amazon.

The goal wasn’t just to win cloud-computing contracts. Amazon sold facial-recognition software to law-enforcement agencies and has reportedly pitched it to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Amazon also wanted to become the portal through which government bureaus buy staples, chairs, coffee beans, and electronic devices. This wasn’t a trivial slice of business; the U.S. government spends more than $50 billion on consumer goods each year. In 2017, the House of Representatives quietly passed the so-called Amazon amendment, buried within a larger appropriations bill. The provisions claimed to modernize government procurement, but also seemed to set the terms for Amazon’s dominance of this business. Only after competitors grasped the significance of the amendment did a backlash slow the rush toward Amazon. (The government is preparing to run a pilot program testing a few different vendors.)

Still, government’s trajectory was easy to see, especially if one looked outside the capital city. In 2017, Amazon signed an agreement with a little-known organization called U.S. Communities, with the potential to yield an estimated $5.5 billion. U.S. Communities negotiates on behalf of more than 55,000 county and municipal entities (school districts, library systems, police departments) to buy chalk, electronics, books, and the like. A 2018 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance documented how a growing share of the physical items that populate public spaces has come to be supplied by Amazon.

At the heart of Amazon’s growing relationship with government is a choking irony. Last year, Amazon didn’t pay a cent of federal tax. The company has mastered the art of avoidance, by exploiting foreign tax havens and moonwalking through the seemingly infinite loopholes that accountants dream up. Amazon may not contribute to the national coffers, but public funds pour into its own bank accounts. Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.

What type of ego does Jeff Bezos possess? The president of the United States has tested his capacity for sublimation by pummeling him mercilessly. In Trump’s populist morality play, “Jeff Bozo” is cast as an overlord. He crushes small businesses; he rips off the postal service; he stealthily advances corporate goals through his newspaper, which Trump misleadingly refers to as the “Amazon Washington Post.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to use the machinery of state to flay Amazon: “If I become president, oh do they have problems.” Don Graham’s warnings about the downsides of newspaper ownership suddenly looked prophetic.

It’s not that Bezos has always whistled past these attacks: In a countertweet, he once joked about launching Donald Trump into space. However, the nature of Bezos’s business, with both government and red-state consumers, means that he would rather avoid presidential hostility.

Despite the vitriol, or perhaps because of it, Amazon hired the lobbyist Jeff Miller, a prodigious Trump fundraiser; Bezos conveys his opinions to the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. In 2017, Bezos won a nomination to join a panel advising the Defense Department on technology, although the swearing-in was canceled after Pentagon officials realized that he had not undergone a background check. (He never joined the panel.) One former White House aide told me, “If Trump knew how much communication Bezos has had with officials in the West Wing, he would lose his mind.”

In the fall of 2017, the Pentagon announced a project called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The project would migrate the Defense Department’s data to a centralized cloud, so that the agency could make better use of artificial intelligence and more easily communicate across distant battlefields. The Pentagon signaled the importance of the venture with the amount it intended to spend on it: $10 billion over 10 years. But it has the potential to be even more lucrative, since the rest of the federal government tends to follow the Pentagon’s technological lead.

Firms vied ferociously to win the contract. Because Amazon was widely seen as the front-runner, it found itself on the receiving end of most of the slings. Its rivals attempted to stoke Trump’s disdain for Bezos. An executive at the technology company Oracle created a flowchart purporting to illustrate Amazon’s efforts, titled “A Conspiracy to Create a Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly.” Oracle has denied slipping the graphic to the president, but a copy landed in Trump’s hands.


Bezos and his then-wife, MacKenzie, attend the 2017 Vanity Fair Oscars party. Bezos has immersed himself in Hollywood culture. (Mike Coppola / VF17 / Getty)
Oracle also tried to block Amazon in court. Its filings spun a sinister narrative of Amazon infiltrating the Pentagon. A former consultant for Amazon Web Services had landed a top job in the secretary of defense’s office, but at the heart of Oracle’s tale was a project manager who had arrived at the Pentagon by way of Amazon named Deap Ubhi. Even as he worked in government, Ubhi tweeted: “Once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.” Oracle alleged that he stayed true to that self-description as he helped shape JEDI to favor his alma mater. (Amazon countered that dozens of people developed the contract, and that Ubhi worked on JEDI for only seven weeks, in its early stages.) When the Pentagon formally announced JEDI’s specifications, only Amazon and Microsoft met them.

Ubhi’s role in the project was concerning, but not enough for either a federal judge or the Pentagon to halt JEDI. There was “smoke,” the judge said, but no “fire.” This victory should have paved the way for Amazon. But with the Pentagon nearly set to award JEDI this summer, the president’s new secretary of defense, Mark Esper, announced that he was delaying the decision and reexamining the contract. A Pentagon official told me that Trump had seen Tucker Carlson inveigh against JEDI on Fox News and asked for an explanation. Senator Marco Rubio, who received more than $5 million in campaign contributions from Oracle during the 2016 campaign cycle, called for the Pentagon to delay awarding the bid, and reportedly pressed the case in a phone call with Trump. (Rubio received a much smaller donation from Amazon in the same period.) Trump seems to have been unable to resist a chance to stick it to his enemy, perhaps mortally imperiling Amazon’s chance to add $10 billion to its bottom line.

Given Trump’s motives, it’s hard not to sympathize with Bezos. But Trump’s spite—and the terrible precedent set by his punishment of a newspaper owner—doesn’t invalidate the questions asked of Amazon. Its critics have argued that government shouldn’t latch itself onto a single company, especially not with a project this important. They noted that storing all of the Pentagon’s secrets with one provider could make them more vulnerable to bad actors. It could also create an unhealthy dependence on a firm that might grow complacent with its assured stream of revenue and lose its innovative edge over time.


JEDI sits within the context of larger questions about the government’s relationship to Amazon. Fears that the public was underwriting the company’s continued growth haunted Amazon’s attempt to build a second headquarters in Queens—New York government looked like it was providing tax breaks and subsidies to the business that least needs a boost.

While Amazon’s aborted move to Long Island City attracted all the attention, the building of a similar bastion just outside Washington, D.C., is more ominous. Of course, there are plenty of honorable reasons for a company to set up shop in the prosperous shadow of the Capitol. But it’s hard to imagine that Amazon wasn’t also thinking about its budding business with the government—an opportunity that the delay of JEDI will hardly dissuade it from pursuing. According to a Government Accountability Office survey of 16 agencies, only 11 percent of the federal government has made the transition to the cloud.

The company is following in its owner’s tracks. Just as Bezos has folded himself into the fraternity of Washington power—yukking it up at the Alfalfa and Gridiron Clubs—thousands of Amazon implants will be absorbed by Washington. Executives will send their kids to the same fancy schools as journalists, think-tank fellows, and high-ranking government officials. Amazonians will accept dinner-party invites from new neighbors. The establishment, plenty capacious, will assimilate millionaire migrants from the other Washington. Amazon’s market power will be matched by political power; the interests of the state and the interests of one enormous corporation will further jumble—the sort of combination that has, in the past, never worked out well for democracy.


4.0
jeff bezos was with his people, the feted guest at the 2018 meeting of the National Space Society. The group awarded him a prize it could be sure he would appreciate: the Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for Space Settlement Advocacy. After a dinner in his honor, Bezos sat onstage to chat with an editor from GeekWire. But before the discussion could begin, Bezos interjected a question: “Does anybody here in this audience watch a TV show called The Expanse?”

The question pandered to the crowd, eliciting applause, hoots, and whistles. The Expanse, which had been broadcast on the Syfy channel, is about the existential struggles of a space colony, set in the far future, based on novels that Bezos adores. Despite the militancy of its devoted fans, Syfy had canceled The Expanse. Angry protests had ensued. A plane had flown over an Amazon office in Santa Monica, California, with a banner urging the company to pick up the show.

Bezos has justified Amazon’s investment in Hollywood with a quip: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”
As the Space Society’s exuberant reaction to Bezos’s first question began to wane, Bezos juiced the crowd with another: “Do you guys know that the cast of The Expanse is here in the room?” He asked the actors to stand. From his years overseeing a movie studio, Bezos has come to understand the dramatic value of pausing for a beat. “Ten minutes ago,” he told the room, “I just got word that The Expanse is saved.” And, in fact, he was its benefactor. Invoking the name of the spaceship at the center of the series, he allowed himself to savor the fist-pumping euphoria that surrounded him. “The Rocinante is safe.”

The Expanse was one small addition to Bezos’s Hollywood empire, which will soon be housed in the old Culver Studios, where Hitchcock once filmed Rebecca and Scorsese shot Raging Bull. Amazon will spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion on TV shows and movies this year.

When Bezos first announced Amazon’s arrival in Hollywood, he bluntly stated his revolutionary intent. He vowed to create “a completely new way of making movies,” as he put it to Wired. Amazon set up a page so that anyone, no matter their experience, could submit scripts for consideration. It promised that it would let data drive the projects it commissioned—some in the company liked to describe this as the marriage of “art and science.”

This bluster about Amazon’s heterodox approach turned out to be unreflective of the course it would chart. When it streamed its second batch of pilots, in 2014, it analyzed viewing patterns, then set aside the evidence. Bezos walked into the green-light meeting and announced that Amazon needed to press forward with the least-watched of the five pilots: Transparent, a show about a transgender parent of three adult children. Bezos had read the rave reviews and made up his mind.

The critical success of Transparent set the template for Amazon Studios. In the early 2010s, the best talent still preferred to work for cable networks. For a new platform to pry that talent away and attract viewers, it needed to generate attention, to schedule a noisy slate. Instead of playing to the masses, Amazon defined itself as an indie studio, catering to urban upper-middle-class tastes, although the executives in Seattle were hardly hipsters themselves. One former executive from Amazon’s book-publishing arm told me, “I remember when Lena Dunham’s proposal was going out, they were like, ‘Who is Lena Dunham?’ ”

As a nascent venture, Amazon Studios was forced to hew closely to one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles: Frugality. Executives rummaged through other companies’ rejection piles for unconventional scripts. It bought Catastrophe, a cast-aside comedy, for $100,000 an episode. With the BBC, it acquired the first season of Fleabag for about $3 million.

Parsimony proved to be a creative stimulant. The studio’s risky projects were awards magnets. Amazon won Golden Globes in all five years it was in contention. When the camera panned for black-tie reaction shots to these victories, the glare of Bezos’s unmistakable scalp would jump off the screen. According to his colleagues, these awards provided him with palpable pleasure, and he thrust himself into their pursuit. To curry favor with those who cast ballots for big prizes, he hosted parties at his Beverly Hills property, which had once been owned by DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen.

Reading interviews with Bezos from back in the days of his rapid ascent, it’s hard to believe that he ever imagined becoming a king of Hollywood or that leading men like Matt Damon would drape their arms over his shoulders and pose for photographs as if they were chums. When he talked about his own nerdiness, he was self-effacing, sometimes painfully so. He once told Playboy, “I am not the kind of person women fall in love with. I sort of grow on them, like a fungus.”


Bezos at a Blue Origin event this spring. He funds that venture—which builds infrastructure for extraterrestrial voyage—by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year. Bezos calls Blue Origin his “most important work.” (Mark Wilson / Getty)
When Bezos attended the 2013 Vanity Fair Oscars party, he didn’t act as if he owned the room. Still, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin kept to a corner, Bezos and his now ex-wife, MacKenzie, circulated through the throngs. They might have clung to each other, but they also gamely engaged whoever approached them. MacKenzie once admitted to Vogue that her introversion made her nervous at such events, but she described her husband as a “very social guy.”


Hollywood, both the business and the scene, is an intoxicant. Just as in Washington, Bezos immersed himself in a new culture. Paparazzi captured him yachting with the media mogul Barry Diller. He got to know the powerful agent Patrick Whitesell, whose wife, Lauren Sanchez, would later become Bezos’s girlfriend. He began to appear at the parties of famous producers, such as Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice. As one Hollywood executive told me, “Bezos is always showing up. He would go to the opening of an envelope.”

Bezos has justified Amazon’s investment in Hollywood with a quip: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.” This is an intentionally glib way of saying that Amazon is different from its competitors. It’s not just a streaming service (like Netflix) or a constellation of channels (like Comcast), although it’s both of those things. Amazon is an enclosed ecosystem, and it hopes that its video offerings will prove a relatively inexpensive method of convincing people to live within it.

Amazon’s goal is visible in one of the metrics that it uses to judge the success of its programming. It examines the viewing habits of users who sign up for free trials of Amazon Prime, and then calculates how many new subscriptions to the service a piece of programming generates. As it deliberates over a show’s fate, Amazon considers a program’s production costs relative to the new subscriptions it yields. In the earliest days of the studio, nice reviews might have been enough to overcome these analytics. But Amazon has demonstrated that it will cancel even a Golden Globe winner, such as I Love Dick, if the metrics suggest that fate.


Back in the ’60s, countercultural critiques of television regarded it as a form of narcotic that induced a state of mindless consumerism. That’s not an unfair description of television’s role in Prime’s subscription model. Despite its own hyperrational approach to the world, Amazon wants to short-circuit the economic decision making of its consumers. Sunil Gupta, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the company, told me, “When Amazon started Prime, it cost $79 and the benefit was two-day free shipping. Now, most smart people will do the math and they will ask, Is $79 worth it? But Bezos says, I don’t want you to do this math. So I’ll throw in movies and other benefits that make the computation of value difficult.”

When Bezos creates the terms for his business, or for society, he’s no more capable of dispassion than anyone else. To live in the world of his creation is to live in a world of his biases and predilections.
When Amazon first created Prime, in 2005, Bezos insisted that the price be set high enough that the program felt like a genuine commitment. Consumers would then set out to redeem this sizable outlay by faithfully consuming through Amazon. One hundred million Prime subscribers later, this turned out to be a masterstroke of behavioral economics. Prime members in the U.S. spend $1,400 a year on Amazon purchases, compared with $600 by nonmembers, according to a survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. It found that 93 percent of Prime customers keep their subscription after the first year; 98 percent keep it after the second. Through Prime, Bezos provided himself a deep pool of cash: When subscriptions auto-renew each year, the company instantly has billions in its pockets. Bezos has turned his site into an almost unthinking habit. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Jack Ryan are essential tools for patterning your existence.


As Bezos has deepened his involvement in the studio, it has begun to make bigger bets that reflect his sensibility. It spent $250 million to acquire the rights to produce a Lord of the Rings TV series. It reportedly paid nine figures for the services of the husband-and-wife team behind HBO’s Westworld and has plans to adapt novels by such sci-fi eminences as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Bezos has involved himself in wrangling some of these projects. He made personal pleas to J. R. R. Tolkien’s estate as the Lord of the Rings deal hung in the balance. An agent told me that Bezos has emailed two of his clients directly; Amazon executives apply pressure by invoking his name in calls: He’s asking about this project every day.

Read: Why Amazon just spent a fortune to turn ‘Lord of the Rings’ into TV

As a kid, Bezos would spend summers at his grandfather’s ranch in Cotulla, Texas, where he would help castrate bulls and install pipes. He would also watch soap operas with his grandmother. But his primary entertainment during those long days was science fiction. A fanatic of the genre had donated a robust collection to the local library, and Bezos tore his way through shelves of Isaac Asimov and Jules Verne. Describing his affinity for the novels of the sci-fi writer Iain M. Banks, he once said, “There’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.” The comment contains a flash of self-awareness. For all his technocratic instincts, for all his training as an engineer and a hedge-fund quant, a romantic impulse coexists with his rationalism, and sometimes overrides it.


It is perhaps fitting that Bezos’s lone brush with scandal transpired in Hollywood. What befuddled so many of his admirers is that the scandal revealed a streak of indiscipline that doesn’t mesh with the man who created a company so resolutely fixated on the long term, so committed to living its values. The expectation embedded in this confusion is unfair. While the culture has sometimes touted Bezos as a superhero, he’s an earthling in the end. When he creates the terms for his business, or for society, he’s no more capable of dispassion than anyone else. To live in the world of Bezos’s creation is to live in a world of his biases and predilections.

5.0
i’m loath to look back at my Amazon purchase history, decades long and filled with items of questionable necessity. The recycling bin outside my house, stuffed full of cardboard covered with arrows bent into smiles, tells enough of a story. I sometimes imagine that the smile represents the company having a good laugh at me. My fidelity to Amazon comes despite my record of criticizing it.

When we depend on Amazon, Amazon gains leverage over us. To sell through the site is to be subjected to a system of discipline and punishment. Amazon effectively dictates the number of items that a seller can place in a box, and the size of the boxes it will handle. (To adhere to Amazon’s stringent requirements, a pet-food company recently reduced its packaging by 34 percent.) Failure to comply with the rules results in a monetary fine. If a company that sells through Amazon Marketplace feels wronged, it has little recourse, because its contract relinquishes the right to sue. These are just the terms of service.

The man who styles himself as the heroic Jean-Luc Picard has built a business that better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg, which informs its victims, You will be assimilated and Resistance is futile.
Is there even a choice about Amazon anymore? This is a question that haunts businesses far more than consumers. Companies such as Nike resisted Amazon for years; they poured money into setting up their own e-commerce sites. But even when Nike didn’t sell its products on Amazon, more Nike apparel was sold on the site than any other brand. Anyone could peddle Nike shoes on Amazon without having to explain how they obtained their inventory. Because Amazon Marketplace had become a pipeline connecting Chinese factories directly to American homes, it also served as a conduit for counterfeit goods, a constant gripe of Nike’s. Wired reported that, at one point during this year’s Women’s World Cup, six of Amazon’s 10 best-selling jerseys appeared to be knockoffs. To have any hope of controlling this market, Nike concluded that it had no option but to join its rival. (Amazon has said that it prohibits the sale of counterfeit products.)

Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery, a website that vivisects Silicon Valley companies, has incisively described Amazon’s master plan. He argues that the company wants to provide logistics “for basically everyone and everything,” because if everything flows through Amazon, the company will be positioned to collect a “tax” on a stunning array of transactions. When Amazon sells subscriptions to premium cable channels such as Showtime and Starz, it reportedly takes anywhere from a 15 to 50 percent cut. While an item sits in an Amazon warehouse waiting to be purchased, the seller pays a rental fee. Amazon allows vendors to buy superior placement in its search results (it then marks those results as sponsored), and it has carved up the space on its own pages so that they can be leased as advertising. If a business hopes to gain access to Amazon’s economies of scale, it has to pay the tolls. The man who styles himself as the heroic Jean-Luc Picard has thus built a business that better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg, a society-swallowing entity that informs victims, You will be assimilated and Resistance is futile.

In the end, all that is admirable and fearsome about Amazon converges. Every item can be found on its site, which makes it the greatest shopping experience ever conceived. Every item can be found on its site, which means market power is dangerously concentrated in one company. Amazon’s smart speakers have the magical power to translate the spoken word into electronic action; Amazon’s doorbell cameras have the capacity to send video to the police, expanding the surveillance state. With its unique management structure and crystalline articulation of values and comprehensive collection of data, Amazon effortlessly scales into new businesses, a reason to marvel and cower. Jeff Bezos has won capitalism. The question for the democracy is, are we okay with that?


On jeff bezos’s ranch in West Texas, there is a mountain. Burrowed inside its hollowed-out core is a cascading tower of interlaced Geneva wheels, levers, and a bimetallic spring. These innards, still not fully assembled, will move the Clock of the Long Now, a timepiece that has been designed to run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years, with a hand that advances with each turn of the century. Bezos has supplied $42 million to fund the clock’s construction, an attempt to dislodge humans from the present moment, to extend the species’ sense of time. Bezos has argued that if humans “think long term, we can accomplish things that we wouldn’t otherwise accomplish.”

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Performance reviews at Amazon ask employees to name their “superpower.” An employer probably shouldn’t create the expectation that its staff members possess qualities that extend beyond mortal reach, but I’m guessing Bezos would answer by pointing to his ability to think into the future. He dwells on the details without sacrificing his clarity about the ultimate destination. It’s why he can simultaneously prod one company to master the grocery business while he pushes another to send astronauts to the moon by 2024, in the hope that humans will eventually mine the astronomical body for the resources needed to sustain colonies. Bezos has no hope of ever visiting one of these colonies, which wouldn’t arise until long after his death, but that fact does nothing to diminish the intensity of his efforts.

Read: Jeff Bezos has plans to extract the moon’s water

That Donald Trump has picked Jeff Bezos as a foil is fitting. They represent dueling reactions to the dysfunction of so much of American life. In the face of the manipulative emotionalism of this presidency, it’s hard not to pine for a technocratic alternative, to yearn for a utopia of competence and rules. As Trump runs down the country, Bezos builds things that function as promised.


Yet the erosion of democracy comes in different forms. Untrammeled private power might not seem the biggest threat when public power takes such abusive form. But the country needs to think like Bezos and consider the longer sweep of history before permitting so much responsibility to pool in one man, who, without ever receiving a vote, assumes roles once reserved for the state. His company has become the shared national infrastructure; it shapes the future of the workplace with its robots; it will populate the skies with its drones; its website determines which industries thrive and which fall to the side. His investments in space travel may remake the heavens. The incapacity of the political system to ponder the problem of his power, let alone check it, guarantees his Long Now. He is fixated on the distance because he knows it belongs to him.

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



技术
杰夫-贝索斯的总体规划
这位亚马逊创始人兼首席执行官对他的帝国和他自己的要求是什么，以及这对我们其他人意味着什么。

作者：Franklin Foer
2019年11月号
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1.0
杰弗里-贝佐斯在美国商业巨头的万神殿中属于什么位置？安德鲁-卡内基的炉灶锻造了钢铁，成为铁路和城市的骨架。约翰-D-洛克菲勒提炼了90%的美国石油，为当时的电气化国家提供了照明。比尔-盖茨创造了一个程序，被认为是打开电脑的先决条件。


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55岁的贝索斯从未像这些先辈那样彻底支配过一个主要市场，虽然他目前是地球上最富有的人，但他的财富比盖茨在巅峰时期还要少。然而，洛克菲勒在很大程度上满足于油井、泵站和轨道车；盖茨的财富则取决于一个操作系统。亚马逊创始人兼首席执行官所建立的帝国范围更广。事实上，这在美国资本主义的漫长历史上是没有先例的。

今天，贝索斯控制了美国所有电子商务的近40%。在亚马逊上进行的产品搜索比在谷歌上进行的更多，这使得贝索斯能够建立一个与整个IBM一样有价值的广告业务。据估计，亚马逊网络服务几乎控制了云计算行业的一半--通用电气、联合利华，甚至中情局等各种机构都依赖其服务器。该公司控制了42%的纸质图书销售和三分之一的流媒体视频市场；其视频平台Twitch在游戏玩家中很受欢迎，每天吸引1500万用户。加上《华盛顿邮报》，贝索斯至少是迪斯尼的鲍勃-艾格或AT&T的西装革履者的对手，可以说是美国文化中最有权力的人。


我第一次对亚马逊的力量感到担忧是在五年前。我对该公司如何欺负图书业，从依赖它的出版商那里榨取越来越多的有利条件感到焦虑不安。当我曾经与之合作出版过一本书的哈谢特集团拒绝接受亚马逊的要求时，它受到了惩罚。亚马逊推迟了阿歇特图书的发货；当消费者搜索一些阿歇特图书时，它将他们转到其他出版商的类似图书。2014年，我为《新共和》杂志写了一篇封面故事，标题很有斗志。"亚马逊必须被阻止"。引用我的文章，该公司随后终止了在该杂志上进行的政治喜剧《阿尔法屋》的广告活动。

从那时起，贝索斯的影响力只增不减。对美国总统来说，他是一个克星。对许多美国人来说，他是一个方便和富足的有益的巫师。在过去的一年里，亚马逊宣布了以下的努力。它将为潜在的购房者和房地产经纪人牵线搭桥，并将他们的新家与亚马逊设备整合在一起；它将使其语音助手Alexa能够访问医疗保健数据，如处方的状态或血糖读数；它将在辛辛那提郊外建造一个300万平方英尺的货运机场。它将为其Prime服务的会员提供次日送达服务；除了已经拥有的Whole Foods之外，它还将开一家新的连锁杂货店；它将为美国职业棒球大联盟的比赛提供流媒体；它将向轨道发射3000多颗卫星，为全世界提供高速互联网。

贝索斯担心，在未来几代人中，地球不断增长的能源需求将超过其有限的供应。"他说："我们必须进入太空以拯救地球。
贝索斯的企业现在已经非常庞大和多样，很难真正理解他的帝国的性质，更不用说他的野心的终点。杰夫-贝佐斯到底想要什么？或者，稍微换个说法，他相信什么？鉴于他对世界的影响力，这些问题都不小。然而，他在很大程度上对自己的意图保持沉默；许多长期合作的同事都不记得他曾经表达过政治观点。在亚马逊存在的四分之一个世纪中，回放他的访谈，就是听他一遍又一遍地复述同样的不露声色的轶事。


为了更好地了解他，我花了五个月时间与亚马逊现任和前任高管，以及该公司竞争对手的人员和学术观察家交谈。贝索斯本人拒绝参与这篇报道，现任员工也只愿意在不公开的情况下与我交谈。即使是前员工也大多愿意保持匿名，因为他们认为自己最终可能希望为一个与贝索斯的庞大关注点有某种程度上的纠缠的企业工作。

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在这些对话的过程中，我对贝索斯的看法开始转变。我对这个人的许多假设都消失了；钦佩与持续的不安交织在一起。我对他的最终目标有了新的认识。

贝索斯喜欢无情这个词--它一再出现在他每年给股东的信件中，我一直认为他的目标是为了统治而统治。在一个推崇企业巨无霸的时代，他似乎决心成为他们中最大的一个。但如果说贝索斯的最终目标是统治地球，那就是对他的误解。他的野心不受地球引力的约束。

在贝索斯确定使用亚马逊网站之前，他曾想过将他尚未启动的商店命名为MakeItSo.com。他想使用这个短语，因为他无法抑制长期以来的热情。这个被拒绝的名称是贝索斯所崇拜的一个人的一句话：星际飞船Enterprise-D的船长让-吕克-皮卡德。

贝索斯对《星际迷航》及其众多衍生产品的狂热是毫不掩饰的。他有一家名为Zefram的控股公司，以纪念这位发明曲速驱动器的人物。他说服了电影《星际迷航》的制作人让他客串一个星际舰队的官员。他给他的狗取名为卡马拉，这是以一个出现在一集中的女人的名字命名的，她是皮卡德 "完美 "但无法实现的伴侣。随着时间的推移，贝佐斯和皮卡德在身体上已经趋于一致。像帕特里克-斯图尔特(Patrick Stewart)所扮演的星际探险家一样，贝索斯剃掉了他那高光泽度的头发，获得了铁一般的体格。一位朋友曾经说过，贝索斯采用剧烈的健身计划是为了期待有一天他也能上天。

当记者追踪到贝索斯的高中女友时，她说："他之所以赚这么多钱，就是为了去外太空。" 这一评估几乎不需要想象力的飞跃。作为迈阿密帕尔梅托高级中学1982级的告别演说者，贝索斯利用他的毕业演讲展开了他对人类的愿景。他大声梦想着有一天，他的数百万地球同胞将搬迁到太空中的殖民地。一份当地报纸报道说，他的意图是 "让所有的人离开地球，看到它变成一个巨大的国家公园"。

大多数凡人最终都放弃了青少年的梦想，但贝索斯仍然热衷于他的梦想，即使他已经控制了越来越多的此时此地。批评家们责备他的慈善吝啬，至少相对于他的财富来说是这样，但贝索斯认为他的主要人道主义贡献并不是适当的慈善。那是一家名为 "蓝色起源 "的追求利润的公司，致力于实现他高中毕业演讲中的预言。他通过每年出售约10亿美元的亚马逊股票，为该企业提供资金--该企业制造火箭、漫游车和允许在地球大气层以外航行的基础设施。比起他对自己的巨无霸公司或《华盛顿邮报》的所有权，比起他承诺为低收入美国人解决无家可归和教育问题的非营利组织提供的20亿美元，贝佐斯称蓝色起源是他 "最重要的工作"。

他认为这项工作如此重要，因为它旨在应对的威胁是如此严重。令贝索斯担忧的是，在未来几代人中，地球不断增长的能源需求将超过其有限的供应。他说，这种危险 "不一定是灭绝，"而是停滞。"我们将不得不停止增长，我认为这是一个非常糟糕的未来。" 当其他人可能担心气候变化将很快使地球变得不适合居住时，这位亿万富翁却为增长减少的前景绞尽脑汁。但是，他所描述的情景确实是严峻的。没有足够的能源，配给和饥饿将随之而来。多年来，贝索斯一直让自己无法接触到询问有关亚马逊问题的记者。但他以传教士的热情分享他对太空殖民的信念。"我们必须进入太空以拯救地球"。

这种信仰的核心是贝索斯在青少年时期读过的一篇文章。1976年，普林斯顿大学物理学家杰拉德-K-奥尼尔（Gerard K. O'Neill）写了一本关于进入太空的民粹主义案例，名为《高边疆》（The High Frontier），这本书受到科幻怪人、NASA职能部门和年老的嬉皮士们的喜爱。作为普林斯顿大学的学生，贝索斯参加了奥尼尔研讨会，并管理着学生探索和发展太空的校园分会。通过蓝色起源，贝佐斯正在制定实现奥尼尔愿景的详细计划。

这位教授想象的殖民地被安置在漂浮在地球和月球之间的数英里长的圆柱形管道内。这些管子将维持母星上的模拟生活，有土壤、含氧空气、自由飞翔的鸟类，以及 "被海浪拍打的海滩"。当贝索斯描述这些殖民地时，并展示了艺术家们对它们的渲染，他听起来几乎是狂喜的。"这是茂宜岛最好的一天，一年四季都是如此。没有雨，没有风暴，没有地震。" 由于这些殖民地将允许人类人口在没有任何地球约束的情况下增长，这个物种将前所未有地繁荣。"我们可以在太阳系中拥有一万亿人类，这意味着我们会有一千个莫扎特和一千个爱因斯坦。这将是一个不可思议的文明。"

贝索斯以充满激情的演说和令人信服的细节掌控能力召集了公众。然而，在他的演讲中，仍然存在着一个人类的漏洞。谁将管理这个新世界？谁来编写它的法律？谁将决定哪些地球人被允许进入殖民地？这些问题都没有明确的答案，只是他热切地相信企业家，那些有自己形象的人，将塑造未来。而且他将尽力使之成为现实。凭借他的财富，以及财富所允许的传声筒，贝索斯正试图为人类的未来设定条件，以便他的乌托邦能够扎根。

在某种程度上，贝索斯已经创造了一个由数百万人居住的圆柱形管道的原型，它被称为Amazon.com。他的创造与其说是一个公司，不如说是一个包含的系统。如果它仅仅是一个销售几乎所有可销售商品并在48小时内交货的商店，它仍将是美国商业史上最令人敬畏的创造。但亚马逊既是一个有形的公司，也是一个抽象的、强大得多的公司。

贝索斯的企业颠覆了长期以来关于资本主义基本性质的戒律，特别是伟大的奥地利经济学家弗里德里希-哈耶克(Friedrich Hayek)所奉行的思想。在第二次世界大战即将结束时，哈耶克写下了《知识在社会中的运用》一文，这是对集中式计划的开创性控诉。哈耶克认为，任何官僚机构都无法与市场的奇迹相提并论，因为市场能自发地、有效地聚合社会的知识。当市场集体制定价格时，该价格反映了分散在行政人员、工人和消费者之间的离散知识。任何政府试图取代这种有机装置--单方面制定价格，甚至试图了解一个经济体的不同运作方式--都是纯粹的狂妄。

与这个时代的功能紊乱和愤世嫉俗形成鲜明对比的是，亚马逊是能力的体现，是少有的经常性工作的机构。
然而，亚马逊已经获得了哈耶克从未想象过的对经济的上帝之眼，任何一个实体都不可能实现。在任何时候，它的网站都有超过6亿件商品出售，有超过300万个供应商在销售这些商品。凭借其过去的购买历史，它已经收集了世界上最全面的消费者欲望目录，这使它能够预测个人和集体的需求。凭借其物流业务--其不断增长的卡车和飞机网络--它对世界各地的货物流动情况有所了解。换句话说，如果马克思主义革命者在美国夺取了政权，他们可以将亚马逊国有化，然后就可以结束了。

阅读。杰夫-贝索斯1500亿美元的财富是一个政策上的失败

亚马逊让其批评者如此恐惧的原因并不纯粹是其规模，而是其发展轨迹。亚马逊的知识库使它有能力建立自己的胜利版本，使一系列的业务变得令人吃惊。面对它的增长，对垄断的长期沉睡的恐惧已经开始浮出水面--据说亚马逊已经发现自己受到联邦贸易委员会和司法部的审查。但与政府审查的另一个对象Facebook不同，贝索斯的公司仍然深受公众的信任。乔治敦大学和奈特基金会发起的2018年民意调查发现，亚马逊比几乎任何其他美国机构都更有信心。尽管唐纳德-特朗普嘲笑贝索斯，但对该公司的这种广泛信任使两党达成共识，尽管接受调查的民主党人比共和党人更热心。他们对亚马逊的评价甚至比美国军队更值得信赖。与定义这个时代的功能障碍和愤世嫉俗形成鲜明对比的是，亚马逊是能力的体现，是少有的经常性工作的机构。

所有这些对贝索斯公司的信心使他成为文化中的一个奇特人物，有时，文化将他视为一个有血有肉的皮卡。如果说 "民主在黑暗中消亡"--这是贝索斯时代《华盛顿邮报》的座右铭，那么他就是光明的拯救者，是扭转伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦的老牌大报终结性衰退的英雄。当他在Medium上写了一篇文章，声称《国家询问报》试图敲诈他时，他被誉为反对小报流氓和网络欺凌的立场。

随着亚马逊的成熟，它已经具备了比私营企业更多的特征。它越来越多地扮演着社会机构的角色，为公众利益服务。在它因所谓的工人待遇而受到嘲笑之后--一些仓库员工报告说，他们感到有压力，要放弃上厕所的时间来完成生产率目标，这只是一个例子--它单方面将其在美国的最低工资提高到每小时15美元，然后试图羞辱那些没有效仿的竞争对手。(亚马逊表示，员工可以随时使用卫生间）。随着技术对其劳动力的重塑，亚马逊已拨出7亿美元对其约三分之一的美国员工进行再培训，以适应新的需求。

这些姿态在一定程度上是一种赌博，以避免公司的声誉被指责为贪婪的行为。但它们也将亚马逊与公司的旧观念联系起来。以其目前的形式，亚马逊回到了战后出现的大企业。1953年，当通用汽车公司总裁查尔斯-威尔逊（Charles E. Wilson）被提名为国防部长时，他著名地告诉参议院确认小组："我认为对我们国家有利的就是对通用汽车有利的，反之亦然。" 在大多数情况下，这是一个被认真接受为善意声明的格言。为了避免阶级斗争，当时的巨人公司承认工会；他们为雇员提供医疗保健和养老金。诸如约翰-K-加尔布雷思（John K. Galbraith）这样的自由派杰出人士，把公司誉为良性社会秩序的基础。加尔布雷思赞美公司的社会效用，因为他相信公司可以被驯化和利用，为其自身底线以外的利益服务。他认为，当企业的自我服务冲动受到有组织的劳工和政府的 "反作用力 "的制约时，其行为是有益的。

当然，这些力量已经消退了。工会--亚马逊经常压制其组织努力--是其以前的一个不起眼的小角落；监管国家已经严重失灵。因此，虽然亚马逊受到信任，但没有任何对抗力量有意愿或能力来限制它。虽然权力可以积聚在比杰夫-贝索斯更坏的角色身上，但这并不能减轻伴随着这种集中的焦虑感。亚马逊可能是一个庞大的公司，拥有60多万名员工，但它也是一个聪明的、有意志力的人的延伸，他有一个令人难以置信的诀窍，使世界适应他的价值观。

2.0
在杰克-贝索斯与一个旅行独轮车团成员的猎枪式婚姻解体后，她把自己献给了他们唯一的后代。这位来自阿尔伯克基的十几岁的母亲成了她儿子的智力冠军。她每天开车送他40英里，以便他能在休斯顿的一所为高考学生开设的小学上学。当等待名单使他无法进入初中的资优班时，她向官僚们游说，直到他们破例。在贝索斯流动的童年时期，当他的家庭穿越70年代的太阳地带时，杰姬鼓励她的儿子对修补的兴趣，不断把他送到RadioShack。

"我在学术上一直很聪明，"贝索斯去年在华盛顿特区对一位听众说。这是一种被世人认可的情绪，因为他登上了功名利禄的舞台。在普林斯顿大学，他曾想成为一名理论物理学家。在华尔街，他加入了D.E.Shaw，可以说是90年代最聪明和最有冒险精神的对冲基金。该公司会主动给顶尖大学的院长名单上的学生发信，告诉他们。"我们的招聘方式是不折不扣的精英主义"。

创立该公司的计算机科学家大卫-E-肖（David E. Shaw）曾在80年代涉足新生的互联网。这使他对即将到来的革命及其商业影响有了不同寻常的清醒认识。他指定贝索斯在这个新的私有化媒体中寻找投资机会--这种探索使贝索斯找到了自己的大想法。

当贝索斯在1994年创建亚马逊时，他着手建立一个机构，就像那些在他生命中的前三十年里支撑他的那些机构一样。他将建立他自己的大脑贵族，一个让智慧上升到顶峰的地方。早期，贝索斯要求求职者提供他们的SAT分数。该公司的第五名员工尼古拉斯-洛夫乔伊（Nicholas Lovejoy）后来告诉《连线》，面试将采取苏格拉底测试的形式。贝索斯会用诸如 "为什么井盖是圆的？"这样的问题来探究逻辑的敏锐度。据洛夫乔伊说："他的座右铭之一是，我们每雇用一个人，他或她就应该提高下一个人的标准，这样，整个人才库就会不断提高。" 当贝索斯思考人才问题时，换句话说，他自觉地处于一种达尔文模式。

阅读。世界想要更少的技术。亚马逊给了它更多

按照自然选择的逻辑，一家书店成为数字经济中的主导公司几乎是不可能的。从亚马逊的起步阶段开始，贝索斯就掌握了巧妙地回避有关他打算把公司带向何处的问题的艺术。但早在他的对冲基金时代，他就曾与肖踢过 "万能商店 "的想法。他总是给人一种有宏伟计划的印象--相信小说过道和自助区可以作为通往高处的入口。

在白话文中，亚马逊经常与硅谷混为一谈。然而，在其精神中心，亚马逊是一家零售商，而不是一家科技公司。亚马逊需要以弯腰的方式进入一个紧密的、无情的行业，在那里它要面对根深蒂固的实体，如巴诺书店、沃尔玛和塔吉特。在大众市场的零售业中，利润率最薄的公司通常占上风，一个疲软的12月就能毁掉一个年度。即使贝索斯为自己有能力深谋远虑而自豪，他也不得不担心明天的崩溃前景。在紧缩的亚马逊，年底没有大笔奖金，没有为高管们提供长途飞行的商务舱，没有员工厨房里充斥着的蛋白质棒。

贝索斯并不是一个温和的领导者，尤其是在公司的早期。为了按照自己的形象塑造他的组织，他经常对那些没有达到他的高标准的人大打出手。记者布拉德-斯通(Brad Stone)关于该公司不可缺少的书《万能商店》(The Everything Store)中包含了一份贝索斯的尖锐言论清单："你是懒惰还是无能？" "这份文件显然是由B团队写的。谁能把A团队的文件给我？" "你为什么要毁了我的生活？" (亚马逊称这一说法并不反映贝索斯的领导风格。)这是他无休止的提问中的讽刺、贬低版本。但贝索斯的聪明才智和对细节的关注--他总是专注于一个脚注或一个附录--在恐惧的同时也引起了人们的敬佩。"如果你要去参加贝索斯的会议，你的准备就像世界末日一样，"一位前主管告诉我。"你会说，我已经准备了三个星期了。我已经问了我认识的每一个该死的人，让他们想好可能会问的问题。然后贝索斯会问你一个你没有考虑过的问题。"

公司的发展--在成立的第七年已经带来了近30亿美元的收入--促使贝索斯调整他的方法。他设立了一个新的职位--技术顾问，向高层管理人员灌输他的观点；技术顾问将跟随主人至少一年，并成为高管们戏称的 "杰夫机器人"。他的管理风格，一直是高度个人化的，被编入系统和程序。这使他能够扩大自己的影响力，即使他没有坐在会议上，他的气质也会在那里。

2002年，亚马逊将贝索斯的感觉提炼成一套领导原则，其中包括 "发明和简化"、"偏重于行动 "和 "有骨气；有异议和承诺 "等一系列格言。在外人看来，这些听起来太虚伪了，不可能成为狂热信仰的基础。但亚马逊人，正如员工们自己所说的那样，对它们发誓。这些原则现在有14条，是工作面试中提问的主题；它们在入职培训中被教授；它们是员工在绩效评估中被评判的品质。


1998年，杰夫-贝佐斯在西雅图。一家书店会成为数字经济中的主导公司，这一点并不明显，但贝索斯始终相信，小说过道可能会成为通往高处的小路。(Rex Rystedt / Life Images Collection / Getty)
在所有的原则中，也许最神圣的是 "迷恋客户"--只着眼于取悦消费者而不是盯着竞争对手来做决定的戒律--"润滑油大丑闻 "说明了这一信念的支柱。大约10年前，贝索斯意识到，亚马逊正在向客户发送电子邮件，建议他们购买润滑油。这一事实让他大为光火。如果这样的电子邮件到达工作地点，老板可能会瞥见它。如果它到达家里，孩子可能会提出不舒服的问题。贝索斯下令解决这个问题，并威胁说，如果不解决这个问题，将完全关闭亚马逊的电子邮件促销活动。担任全球编辑和网站销售主管的克里斯蒂-库尔特（Kristi Coulter）带领一个小组，花了数周时间编制了一份禁止使用的产品清单，然后由贝索斯的高级代表审查。她告诉我，"这不仅仅是痔疮膏或润滑油，还有发色，任何种类的视黄醇。他们对他们认为会引起尴尬的事情非常保守。即使是牙齿美白的东西，他们也会说，'不，那可能会很尴尬'。 "

攀登亚马逊的组织结构图就是渴望加入最顶层的内部圣殿，称为S-Team（"高级团队"）。这些人是17名高管，他们定期与贝索斯聚会，讨论公司最重要的决定。贝索斯以家庭般的感情对待S团队；其成员最接近于能够读懂他的想法。该小组已经吸收了贝索斯的方法，并将其应用于他不可能触及的公司的角落。据帮助建立亚马逊市场的经理詹姆斯-汤姆森（James Thomson）说，任何人都可以通过网站出售新的或旧的商品，"在大多数公司，高管们喜欢显示他们知道多少。在亚马逊，重点是提出正确的问题。领导层被训练成在数据中找出漏洞"。

一旦高管进入S-Team，他就一直在S-Team中。该部门的稳定性无疑为贝索斯提供了一定程度的安慰，但它也使这个最上层的团队在一个过时的多样性愿景中被煅烧。S-Team中没有非裔美国人；唯一的女性负责人力资源。领导层的组成也没有什么变化，只是往下走了一步。当CNBC检查了管理亚马逊核心业务（包括零售、云计算和硬件）的48名高管时，它发现只有4名女性。

一位前团队领导是一位有色人种，他告诉我，当高层管理人员听到多样性这个词时，他们把它理解为 "降低标准"。"这就是这种典型的自由主义思维，"库尔特告诉我。"他们认为亚马逊是一个基于数据的择优录取制度，但谁在决定什么被计算在内，谁能利用自己的机会？如果副总裁的会议被安排在早上7点，有多少母亲能管理好这些？"

(亚马逊对CNBC用来统计其高级领导层中的女性的方法提出异议）。"一位发言人在一封电子邮件中告诉我，"有几十位女性高管在亚马逊的成功中发挥了关键作用。他列举了该公司慷慨的育儿假政策，对灵活安排时间的承诺，以及其全球员工中超过40%是女性的事实，作为其追求性别平等的证据。他还说，公司的领导原则坚持要求员工 "寻求多样化的观点"。）

功利主义者的盲点是，他认为自己在这个世界上的地位是靠智慧和努力工作赢得的。这种信念使他失去了真正倾听批评者的能力。两年前，在一次全公司的会议上，当被问及S-Team的组成时，贝索斯似乎对投诉的紧迫性不予理会。据CNBC报道，他说，他预计 "那里的任何过渡都会在很长一段时间内逐步发生"。今年最新加入该小组的是另一名白人男性。

贝索斯把他的组织建成了一个反官僚机构。为了对付集团的臃肿趋势，他建立了一个叫做 "双比萨队 "的东西。(就像贝索斯的其他管理创新一样，这听起来像是一个噱头，除了那些拥有博士学位的高级工程师和经济学家接受它作为他们职业生活的组织原则）。根据该理论，亚马逊的团队最好小到可以用两个比萨饼来喂养。

在其仓库中，亚马逊已经使用视频游戏来激励工人--游戏的名字是MissionRacer，追踪产出并让工人相互竞争，促使他们更快地移动。两个比萨饼团队代表了这种游戏化的一个更微妙的白领版本。这些小团队灌输了一种对项目的所有权意识。但是，被安排在这种小团队中的员工也会经历对失败的更大恐惧，因为没有更大的团体可以躲避或更广泛地分配责任。

亚马逊有一系列的程序来指导其不同的团队。贝索斯坚持认为，计划要在六页的备忘录中提出，用完整的句子来写，他把这种形式称为 "叙述"。这种做法源于一种感觉，即PowerPoint已经成为一种掩盖模糊思维的工具。贝索斯推测，写作需要一种更加线性的推理方式。正如该公司的校友约翰-罗斯曼（John Rossman）所描述的那样，他写了一本名为《像亚马逊一样思考》的书，"如果你不能把它写出来，那么你就没有准备好为它辩护。" 在会议开始时，在贝索斯所说的 "自习室 "气氛中，这些六页纸被消耗掉。这确保了听众也不会在会议上装模作样。只有在默默地消化了备忘录之后--这对其作者来说可能是一个令人焦虑的延伸--小组才可以就文件提出问题。


泰勒-希尔/盖蒂
亚马逊的大多数团队都是封闭的实体；所需的专业知识被嵌入到每个小组中。以亚马逊强大的拥有博士学位的经济学家队伍为例。在过去几年中，该公司已经雇用了150多名经济学家，这使得亚马逊成为一个远大于该国任何大学的经济学家雇主。微软和Uber等科技公司也雇用了经济学家，尽管人数没有那么多。虽然其他公司倾向于将他们留在集中的单位，通常从事预测或政策问题，但亚马逊采取了不同的方法。它将经济学家分布在一系列团队中，在那里他们可以进行受控实验，允许对消费者行为进行科学的、因而也是有效的操纵。

无情可能是最亚马逊的词，但贝索斯也谈到了游荡的优点。他在今年给股东的信中写道："漫游是对效率的一种基本平衡"。当我与亚马逊西雅图总部的员工交谈时，他们说他们最欣赏的是雇主允许的智力自主感。一旦他们在批准的六页纸中清楚地阐述了一项任务，他们通常有很大的自由度来实现它，而不需要通过多层批准来争取。漂泊的心态也帮助亚马逊不断地扩展到相邻的业务--或者是起初看起来不相关的业务。在其收集的不断增长的消费者和供应商数据以及其不断发现的对人类需求和人类行为的洞察力的帮助下，该公司不断发现新的增长机会。

阅读。当亚马逊从大到令人难以置信的大时

除了在纳斯达克上市之外，亚马逊是什么？这是一个令人费解的问题。该公司以世界上水量最大的河流命名，但它也有支流向四面八方涌去。零售商几乎不能概括该公司，因为它现在还是一家电影制片厂、一家人工智能开发商、一家设备制造商和一家网络服务提供商。但是把它描述成一个企业集团也不太合适，因为它的许多业务都是紧密结合的，或者最终会结合。当我向亚马逊人提出这个问题时，我感觉到他们认为该公司是一个典范--一种独特的决策方法，一套价值观，通过约60万名员工扩展的杰夫-贝佐斯的世界观。当然，这种描述意味着该公司的扩张没有自然边界；没有任何经济部门本质上超出了其核心竞争力。

3.0
2012年底，唐纳德-格雷厄姆准备出售他所继承的《华盛顿邮报》。他想把报纸交给一个有足够财力的人，以便在下一次经济衰退中保持稳定；他想找一个有足够技术能力的人完成报纸的数字化转型；最重要的是，他想找一个能理解管理的深层含义的人。格雷厄姆提出了一份他要追求的理想所有者的短名单，包括金融家大卫-M-鲁宾斯坦、前纽约市市长迈克尔-布隆伯格、eBay创始人皮埃尔-奥米迪亚和贝佐斯。

最后一个名字尤其吸引了格雷厄姆。那年1月，他与他的朋友和顾问沃伦-巴菲特(Warren Buffett)共进早餐，后者也是《邮报》的股东。巴菲特提到，他认为贝索斯是 "美国最好的CEO"--这几乎是一个非常规的观点，但格雷厄姆以前从未从巴菲特那里听到过。早餐后，格雷厄姆开始着手更好地了解贝索斯的意识形态倾向。"我在谷歌上做了一个原始的搜索，没有发现任何东西，对于拥有这种财富的人来说，几乎没有。我不知道他的政治是什么，"他告诉我。这种空白让格雷厄姆觉得这是一个理想的报社老板的东西。

格雷厄姆派了一名使者去做宣传。那是一次有礼貌但几乎没有希望的谈话。贝索斯并没有排除竞购邮报的可能性，但他也没有表现出任何明显的热情。事实上，他在几个月内放弃了这个话题，这似乎是对他兴趣的最好衡量。当贝索斯对格雷厄姆视而不见时，奥米迪亚，这个最热心的竞标者，继续在寻找这个奖品。

贝索斯过去的声明可能没有显示出党派性，但它们确实表明对呆板的制度主义没有兴趣。像这个时代的许多首席执行官一样，贝索斯认为自己是创造性破坏的工具，对被破坏者没有什么同情心。"他在2011年致股东的信中写道："即使是善意的看门人也会减缓创新。他是在批评纽约的图书出版商，亚马逊旨在削弱他们的权力。但他对那些试图维护其文化权威的自以为是的旧媒体机构也抱有同样的看法。

因此，当贝索斯在沉默了几个月之后，发送了一封三句话的电子邮件，表示对《邮报》感兴趣时，这让人感到惊讶。格雷厄姆计划在爱达荷州的太阳谷与贝佐斯共进午餐，他们都将在那里参加艾伦公司的夏季会议。在格雷厄姆带回出租屋的三明治中，这位老东家向他的首选买家做了一个反直觉的推销。他解释了拥有一份报纸的所有原因。他想让贝索斯知道，报纸是一种自我挫败的工具，用于促进商业利益或任何偏好的议程。这次谈话是一个杰出的实践者对精英的责任的指导。

格雷厄姆不需要向贝佐斯求情。在太阳谷，他们几乎没有讨价还价的条件。"我们吃了两次早午餐，最后我们握手言和，这几乎不同于我在商业上所做的任何交易，"格雷厄姆告诉我。谴责守门人的人突然成为了国家最重要的大门之一的守门人。

在杰夫-贝索斯的生活中，购买邮报并不是一个财务上的重大事件。除了他拥有的数十亿亚马逊股票外，他还在谷歌和Uber的起步阶段悄悄投资了它们。这些年轻的公司明白，贝索斯的印记会使他们在其他任何可能的投资者面前增加机会。(仅Uber的首次公开募股就为他在今年早些时候赚取了约4亿美元，远远超过了他在2013年为《邮报》支付的费用）。

但这次收购是贝索斯声誉史上的一个转折点--重新调整了他在世界的地位感。在收购的前夕，亚马逊与纽约出版业的关系是有争议的。这个自称喜欢石黑一雄小说并创造了一种很酷的新购书方式的友好人士，现在在某些方面被视为文学文化的敌人和垄断者洛克菲勒的继承者。在收购前不久，他写了一份由布拉德-斯通获得的题为 "亚马逊之爱 "的备忘录，要求S-Team思考如何避免公司变得像沃尔玛、高盛和微软一样令人畏惧。尽管他从未为收购《邮报》提供理由，以回应他对亚马逊形象的焦虑--当然还有他自己的焦虑--但在他考虑这个机会时，他心里一定在想这个问题。拯救像邮政这样的公民机构是一个为自己争取不同遗产的机会。

阅读：我为亚马逊运送包裹，那是一场恶梦

贝索斯使邮报在结构上与亚马逊分开--他的家族办公室负责监督该报纸的业务，但他以与他的公司一样的扩张精神来经营它。他发誓要把每一块钱的利润都投入到企业中。在他入主的六年里，《邮报》的新闻编辑部已经从500人增加到刚刚超过850人。

尽管他对该机构进行了投资，但贝索斯向华盛顿特区的过渡是停顿和尴尬的。他花了几个月的时间来访问邮报的新闻编辑室，试图缓解基层员工对新主人意图的紧张情绪。当邮报的伟大编辑本-布拉德利在他执政几个月后去世时，在鲍勃-伍德沃德解释了葬礼的精神意义后，他才决定参加葬礼。直到他派飞机去伊朗接回被囚禁了18个月的记者杰森-雷扎伊安，并亲自陪同他回家，他对报纸的感情似乎才有了深度。媒体称赞贝索斯对他的记者的命运表现出如此强烈的兴趣，这让人感受到媒体是如何颂扬那些他们认为是自己的救世主的。

他可能花了点时间才意识到华盛顿将成为他生活的新中心，但一旦意识到这一点，他就急于把自己植入那里。2016年，他花了2300万美元买下了离伍德罗-威尔逊的旧居不远的一个前博物馆的场地。该博物馆将两座豪宅连在一起，其中一座由托马斯-杰斐逊纪念馆的建筑师约翰-拉塞尔-波普设计。贝索斯保留了其中一栋楼作为他的住宅，并着手翻新另一栋楼，以便进行社交活动，这个空间似乎自觉地让人想起凯瑟琳-格雷厄姆的旧沙龙，只不过有地热。获得贝索斯蓝图的《华盛顿人》杂志预测，一旦完工，它将成为 "华盛顿娱乐界名副其实的死星"。

当贝索斯把自己当成华盛顿的家时，他的公司也是如此，不过是按照自己的条件。奥巴马时期是大科技公司的蓬勃发展时期。高管们经常在白宫里洗牌。访客记录显示，没有一家美国公司比谷歌访问得更频繁。硅谷以其特有的理想主义幌子参与政策辩论，甚至开始雇用身着布里奥尼的影响力贩子。根据它自己的说法，它是在为自由互联网的未来而战，是在为维护网络中立性和防止贪婪的电信公司扼杀新媒体的自由承诺而斗争。

随着科技公司在政策上的大量投资，亚马逊偶尔也会为他们打气，加入他们的联盟。但大多数情况下，它摆出一副漠不关心的样子。亚马逊在游说者方面的花费并不像它的大多数大科技公司那样多，至少在奥巴马时代后期是如此。亚马逊似乎并不关心制定政策，而是确保有利可图的合同。它把政府作为另一个客户来对待，让人着迷。

鉴于民主党人现在对大型科技公司的抨击，很难记得奥巴马是如何热情地拥抱这个行业的，以及大型科技公司是如何以竞选捐款作为回报的。但这个联盟还有一个不太明显的原因。正如医疗保健网站的失败所表明的那样，奥巴马非常需要一支极客队伍。他任命了国家有史以来的第一位首席技术官，政府开始恳求联邦官僚机构将自己上传到云端，它承诺此举将节省资金并更有效地保护敏感材料。


2016年，贝索斯参观了《华盛顿邮报》的新闻编辑室。收购该报是他声誉史上的一个转折点，是为自己争取作为一个有公民意识的机构的捍卫者的遗产的机会。(Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)
云第一是该政策的正式名称。亚马逊与该政策的出台毫无关系，但它却能从中赚取数十亿美元。它早在其竞争对手之前就已涉足云计算业务。亚马逊网络服务最基本的特点是在全球范围内建立了一个服务器群，它以低廉的价格租用这些服务器作为高度安全的数据容器。苹果公司、信息平台Slack和几十家初创公司都在AWS上办公。

如果说零售业是一个令人抓狂的低利润行业，那么AWS则更接近于纯利润。而且亚马逊拥有自己的领域。"七年来，我们没有面临任何类似的竞争。这是令人难以置信的，"贝索斯去年吹嘘道。AWS是这样一个主导者，甚至连亚马逊的竞争对手，包括Netflix，都用它来存放数据--尽管沃尔玛坚决拒绝，理由是担心将其珍贵的机密放在竞争对手的服务器上。沃尔玛比情报界更可疑。2013年，中情局同意花费6亿美元将其数据放在亚马逊的云中。

亚马逊的巨大发展，部分是通过推卸税收责任。政府用大量的合同来奖励这种失败，这将使该公司更加庞大。
其他大科技公司对与国家安全国家纠缠在一起的道德问题感到担忧。但贝索斯从未表示过这种保留。他的祖父为五角大楼开发了导弹防御系统，并监督了核实验室。贝索斯从小就沉浸在太空时代的浪漫中，那是一个大企业和大政府联袂实现伟大国家目标的时代。此外，被信任掌握美国最神秘的机构的秘密，给了亚马逊一个可以在任何销售中使用的话题--向任何其他政府买家推荐它的凭证。


亚马逊最大的优势之一是它的学习能力，它最终适应了华盛顿客户主义的老路，在其说客名单上增加了三名前国会议员。(自2012年以来，亚马逊的游说支出增加了近470%）。它还开始雇用走出其机构的官员。当奥巴马政府的最高采购官员安妮-隆(Anne Rung)离开她的职位时，她直接去了亚马逊。

其目的不仅仅是为了赢得云计算合同。亚马逊向执法机构出售面部识别软件，据说还向移民和海关执法局推销过。亚马逊还希望成为政府机构购买主食、椅子、咖啡豆和电子设备的门户。这不是一个微不足道的业务片断；美国政府每年在消费品上的花费超过500亿美元。2017年，众议院悄悄地通过了所谓的亚马逊修正案，埋在一个更大的拨款法案中。这些条款声称要使政府采购现代化，但也似乎为亚马逊在这一业务中的主导地位设定了条件。只有在竞争者掌握了该修正案的意义之后，反击才减缓了对亚马逊的冲动。(政府正准备实施一项试点计划，测试一些不同的供应商）。

不过，政府的发展轨迹还是很容易看到的，尤其是如果在首都以外的地方看。2017年，亚马逊与一个鲜为人知的组织 "美国社区 "签署了一项协议，估计有可能产生55亿美元的收益。美国社区代表55000多个县市实体（学区、图书馆系统、警察部门）进行谈判，以购买粉笔、电子产品、书籍等。地方自力更生研究所2018年的一份报告记录了公共场所的实物物品是如何由亚马逊提供的，其份额越来越大。

亚马逊与政府的关系日益密切，其核心是一个令人窒息的讽刺。去年，亚马逊没有缴纳一分钱的联邦税。该公司已经掌握了避税的艺术，通过利用国外的避税天堂和月球漫步，通过会计师梦想的似乎无限的漏洞。亚马逊可能没有为国库做贡献，但公共资金却涌入了它自己的银行账户。亚马逊的巨大发展，部分是通过推卸税收责任。政府用大量的合同来奖励这种失败，这将使该公司更加庞大。

杰夫-贝佐斯拥有什么样的自我？美国总统通过无情地打击他来测试他的升华能力。在特朗普的民粹主义道德剧中，"杰夫-贝佐 "被塑造成一个霸主。他压榨小企业；他撕毁邮政服务；他通过他的报纸隐蔽地推进企业目标，特朗普误导性地称其为 "亚马逊华盛顿邮报"。在2016年的竞选中，特朗普发誓要利用国家机器来鞭挞亚马逊。"如果我成为总统，哦，他们有问题。" 唐-格雷厄姆关于报纸所有权弊端的警告突然显得很有预见性。

这并不是说贝索斯总是对这些攻击吹口哨。在一条反推特上，他曾开玩笑说要把唐纳德-特朗普发射到太空。然而，贝索斯的业务性质，即与政府和红州消费者的关系，意味着他宁愿避免总统的敌意。

尽管有尖锐的批评，或者也许是因为这样，亚马逊雇用了游说者杰夫-米勒，他是一位出色的特朗普筹款人；贝佐斯向总统女婿贾里德-库什纳传达了他的意见。2017年，贝索斯赢得了加入一个为国防部提供技术咨询的小组的提名，尽管在五角大楼官员意识到他没有经过背景调查后，宣誓仪式被取消了。(他从未加入过该小组。）一位前白宫助手告诉我，"如果特朗普知道贝索斯与西翼的官员有多少沟通，他将失去理智。"

2017年秋天，五角大楼宣布了一个名为联合企业防御基础设施的项目，简称JEDI。该项目将把国防部的数据迁移到一个集中的云端，以便该机构能够更好地利用人工智能，更容易在遥远的战场上进行沟通。五角大楼以其打算在该项目上花费的金额表明了其重要性：10年内100亿美元。但它有可能更加有利可图，因为联邦政府的其他部门往往会跟随五角大楼的技术领先。

各公司为赢得合同进行了激烈的竞争。由于亚马逊被广泛认为是领跑者，它发现自己处于大多数抨击的末端。它的竞争对手试图激起特朗普对贝佐斯的不满。技术公司甲骨文的一名高管制作了一张流程图，声称要说明亚马逊的努力，标题为 "创造十年国防部云计算垄断的阴谋"。甲骨文公司否认将该图塞给了总统，但一份副本落到了特朗普手中。


贝索斯和他当时的妻子麦肯锡出席2017年《名利场》奥斯卡颁奖晚会。贝索斯已将自己沉浸在好莱坞文化中。(Mike Coppola / VF17 / Getty)
甲骨文还试图在法庭上阻挠亚马逊。它的文件阐述了亚马逊渗透到五角大楼的险恶叙事。亚马逊网络服务公司的一名前顾问在国防部长办公室获得了一份高级工作，但甲骨文公司的故事的核心是一位通过亚马逊进入五角大楼的项目经理，他叫Deap Ubhi。即使他在政府工作时，Ubhi也在推特上说。"一旦是亚马逊人，永远是亚马逊人"。甲骨文公司称，他在帮助塑造JEDI以支持他的母校时，一直忠实于这个自我描述。(亚马逊反驳说，有几十个人开发了该合同，而乌比在JEDI的早期阶段只工作了7周）。当五角大楼正式宣布JEDI的规格时，只有亚马逊和微软符合这些规格。

Ubhi在该项目中的作用令人担忧，但还不足以让联邦法官或五角大楼停止JEDI。法官说，有 "烟"，但没有 "火"。这一胜利本应为亚马逊铺平道路。但是，当五角大楼几乎准备在今年夏天授予JEDI时，总统的新任国防部长马克-埃斯珀宣布，他将推迟决定并重新审查该合同。五角大楼的一位官员告诉我，特朗普在福克斯新闻上看到塔克-卡尔森对JEDI的抨击，并要求作出解释。参议员马尔科-鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）在2016年竞选周期中从甲骨文公司获得了超过500万美元的竞选捐款，他呼吁五角大楼推迟授标，据说他在与特朗普的电话中强调了这一点。(Rubio在同一时期从亚马逊收到的捐款要少得多。)特朗普似乎已经无法抗拒一个向他的敌人发难的机会，也许会致命地危及亚马逊为其底线增加100亿美元的机会。

鉴于特朗普的动机，很难不同情贝佐斯。但是，特朗普的口水以及他对一个报社老板的惩罚所开创的可怕先例，并不意味着对亚马逊提出的问题是无效的。亚马逊的批评者认为，政府不应该把自己拴在一家公司身上，尤其是在如此重要的项目上。他们指出，将五角大楼的所有机密存储在一个供应商那里，可能会使他们更容易受到不良分子的攻击。它还可能造成对一家公司的不健康依赖，该公司可能会因其有保障的收入流而沾沾自喜，并随着时间的推移失去其创新优势。


JEDI的背景是关于政府与亚马逊关系的更大问题。对公众为该公司的持续增长提供担保的担忧，困扰着亚马逊在皇后区建立第二总部的尝试--纽约政府看起来像是在为最不需要推动的企业提供税收减免和补贴。

虽然亚马逊流产的长岛市之举吸引了所有的注意力，但在华盛顿特区外建造一个类似的堡垒则更加不祥。当然，有很多光荣的理由让一家公司在国会大厦的繁荣阴影下开店。但很难想象，亚马逊并没有考虑到它与政府之间正在萌芽的业务--JEDI的延迟很难劝阻它去追求这个机会。根据政府问责办公室对16个机构的调查，只有11%的联邦政府已经过渡到了云计算。

该公司正在追随其所有者的足迹。就像贝索斯将自己融入华盛顿权力的兄弟会一样--在苜蓿和格子间俱乐部里uking it up，成千上万的亚马逊植入者将被华盛顿吸收。高管们将把他们的孩子送到与记者、智囊团研究员和高级政府官员一样的高档学校。亚马逊人将接受新邻居的晚餐聚会邀请。庞大的机构，将吸收来自另一个华盛顿的百万富翁移民。亚马逊的市场力量将与政治力量相匹配；国家的利益和一个巨大公司的利益将进一步混乱--这种组合在过去从未对民主产生过影响。


4.0
杰夫-贝索斯和他的人在一起，是国家空间协会2018年会议的受宠嘉宾。该组织向他颁发了一个可以肯定他会欣赏的奖项：杰拉德-K-奥尼尔太空定居宣传纪念奖。在为他举行的晚宴之后，贝索斯坐在舞台上与GeekWire的一名编辑聊天。但在讨论开始之前，贝佐斯插了一个问题。"在座的各位有谁看了一部叫《无间道》的电视剧吗？

这个问题迎合了人群，引起了掌声、欢呼声和口哨声。曾在Syfy频道播出的《远征》讲述了一个太空殖民地的生存斗争，背景是遥远的未来，根据贝索斯崇拜的小说改编。尽管忠实的粉丝很积极，但Syfy还是取消了The Expanse。愤怒的抗议随之而来。一架飞机在加州圣莫尼卡的亚马逊办公室上空飞过，上面挂着敦促该公司购买该剧的横幅。

贝索斯曾用一句调侃的话来证明亚马逊在好莱坞的投资是合理的。"当我们赢得金球奖时，它有助于我们销售更多的鞋子。"
当太空协会对贝索斯的第一个问题的旺盛反应开始减弱时，贝索斯用另一个问题给人群注入了活力。"你们知道《无间道》的演员就在这间屋子里吗？他要求演员们站起来。从他监督电影制片厂的岁月中，贝索斯已经理解了暂停一下的戏剧性价值。"十分钟前，"他对房间里的人说，"我刚刚得到消息，《无间道》得救了。" 而且，事实上，他是其受益者。他引用了这个系列的中心飞船的名字，让自己品味着包围着他的拳头跳动的兴奋感。"罗西纳特号是安全的。"

无垠号是贝索斯的好莱坞帝国的一个小补充，它很快将被安置在旧的卡尔弗制片厂，希区柯克曾在那里拍摄《丽贝卡》，斯科塞斯在那里拍摄《愤怒的公牛》。亚马逊今年估计将在电视节目和电影上花费50亿至60亿美元。

当贝索斯首次宣布亚马逊进入好莱坞时，他直截了当地说出了他的革命意图。他发誓要创造 "一种全新的电影制作方式"，正如他对《连线》所说。亚马逊设立了一个页面，以便任何人，无论其经验如何，都可以提交剧本供审议。它承诺，它将让数据驱动它所委托的项目--该公司的一些人喜欢把这描述为 "艺术与科学 "的结合。

关于亚马逊的异类方法的这种吹嘘，结果并没有反映出它将制定的路线。当它在2014年推出第二批试点时，它分析了观看模式，然后把证据放在一边。贝索斯走进绿灯会议，宣布亚马逊需要推进五个试点中收视率最低的一个。透明》是一部关于三个成年子女的变性人父母的节目。贝索斯看了好评如潮的评论并下定决心。

透明》在评论界的成功为亚马逊工作室树立了模板。在2010年代初，最好的人才仍然喜欢为有线电视网工作。对于一个新的平台来说，要想撬动这些人才并吸引观众，它需要引起关注，安排一个喧闹的片子。亚马逊没有向大众宣传，而是将自己定义为独立制片厂，迎合城市中上层阶级的口味，尽管西雅图的高管们自己也很难成为潮人。一位来自亚马逊图书出版部门的前高管告诉我，"我记得当莉娜-邓纳姆的提案发出来时，他们就说，'莉娜-邓纳姆是谁？ "

作为一个新生的企业，亚马逊工作室被迫严格遵守亚马逊的领导原则之一。节俭。高管们在其他公司的拒绝书堆里翻找非常规的剧本。它以每集10万美元的价格买下了《灾难》（Catastrophe），这是一部演员的喜剧。在英国广播公司的帮助下，它以大约300万美元的价格收购了《跳蚤》的第一季。

事实证明，吝啬是一种创造性的兴奋剂。工作室的风险项目是奖项的磁石。亚马逊在其参与竞争的所有五年中都赢得了金球奖。当镜头扫过这些胜利的黑色领带反应镜头时，贝索斯那张刺眼的头皮会跳出屏幕。据他的同事说，这些奖项给他带来了可感的快乐，他也把自己推到了这些奖项的追求中。为了讨好那些为大奖投票的人，他在贝弗利山庄的房产上举办了派对，该房产曾由梦工厂的联合创始人大卫-格芬拥有。

阅读贝索斯在快速上升时期的访谈，很难相信他曾经想象过成为好莱坞的国王，也很难相信像马特-达蒙这样的主角会把手臂搭在他的肩膀上，并摆出照片，好像他们是朋友一样。当他谈到自己的书呆子气时，他很自卑，有时甚至很痛苦。他曾对《花花公子》说："我不是那种女人会爱上的人。我就像真菌一样，长在她们身上。"


贝索斯在今年春天的蓝色起源活动上。他通过每年出售约10亿美元的亚马逊股票为该企业提供资金--该企业为地外航行建造基础设施。贝佐斯称蓝色起源是他 "最重要的工作"。(Mark Wilson / Getty)
当贝索斯出席2013年《名利场》奥斯卡颁奖晚会时，他并没有表现得好像他拥有这个房间一样。不过，当谷歌联合创始人谢尔盖-布林(Sergey Brin)待在一个角落时，贝索斯和他现在的前妻麦肯锡在人群中穿梭。他们可能会相互依偎，但他们也会勇敢地与任何接近他们的人接触。麦肯锡曾向《时尚》杂志承认，她的内向性格使她在这样的活动中感到紧张，但她形容她的丈夫是一个 "非常善于社交的人"。


好莱坞，无论是生意还是场景，都是一种麻醉剂。就像在华盛顿一样，贝索斯将自己沉浸在一种新的文化中。狗仔队拍到他与媒体大亨巴里-迪勒一起坐游艇。他认识了强大的经纪人帕特里克-怀特塞尔，他的妻子劳伦-桑切斯后来成为贝索斯的女友。他开始出现在著名制片人的聚会上，如《幸存者》和《学徒》的创作者马克-伯内特。正如一位好莱坞高管告诉我的那样，"贝索斯总是出现。他会去参加一个信封的开封仪式"。

贝索斯曾用一句调侃来证明亚马逊在好莱坞的投资是合理的。"当我们赢得金球奖时，它能帮助我们卖出更多鞋子"。这是一种有意的调侃方式，说亚马逊与它的竞争对手不同。它不仅仅是一个流媒体服务（如Netflix）或一个频道星座（如Comcast），尽管它是这两种东西。亚马逊是一个封闭的生态系统，它希望它的视频产品将被证明是说服人们生活在其中的一种相对便宜的方法。

亚马逊的目标在它用来判断其节目成功与否的一个指标中可见一斑。它研究了注册亚马逊Prime免费试用版的用户的观看习惯，然后计算出一个节目产生了多少新的订阅服务。在考虑一个节目的命运时，亚马逊会考虑一个节目的制作成本与它所产生的新订阅量之间的关系。在工作室最早的时候，好的评论可能已经足以克服这些分析方法。但亚马逊已经证明，如果指标显示有这种命运，它甚至会取消金球奖得主，如《我爱迪克》。


早在60年代，对电视的反文化批评将其视为一种麻醉剂，诱发了一种无意识的消费主义状态。这对电视在Prime订阅模式中的作用的描述并非不公平。尽管亚马逊自己对世界采取了超理性的态度，但它想让消费者的经济决策短路。研究过该公司的哈佛商学院教授苏尼尔-古普塔（Sunil Gupta）告诉我："当亚马逊启动Prime时，它的价格是79美元，好处是两天免费送货。现在，大多数聪明人都会做计算，他们会问，79美元值得吗？但贝索斯说，我不想让你做这个数学题。因此，我会在电影和其他好处中加入一些内容，使价值的计算变得困难"。

当贝索斯为他的企业或社会创造条件时，他并不比其他人更有能力保持冷静。生活在他创造的世界里，就是生活在他的偏见和偏爱的世界里。
当亚马逊在2005年首次创建Prime时，贝索斯坚持要把价格定得足够高，让人觉得这个项目是一个真正的承诺。然后，消费者将通过忠实地通过亚马逊消费来赎回这一可观的支出。一亿名Prime用户之后，这被证明是行为经济学的一个大手笔。根据Consumer Intelligence Research Partners的调查，美国的Prime会员每年在亚马逊购物上花费1,400美元，而非会员则为600美元。调查发现，93%的Prime客户在第一年后保持订阅；98%在第二年后保持订阅。通过Prime，贝佐斯为自己提供了一个深厚的现金池。当订阅者每年自动续订时，该公司的口袋里立刻就有了数十亿美元。贝索斯已经把他的网站变成了一种几乎不假思索的习惯。奇妙的梅塞尔夫人》和《杰克-莱恩》是将你的存在模式化的基本工具。


随着贝索斯对该工作室的参与程度加深，它已经开始做更大的赌注，反映出他的感性。它花费2.5亿美元获得了《指环王》电视剧的制作权。据报道，它为HBO《西部世界》背后的夫妻团队的服务支付了9位数，并计划改编尼尔-斯蒂芬森和威廉-吉布森等科幻小说。贝索斯亲自参与了其中一些项目的安排。当《指环王》的交易悬而未决时，他向J.R.R.托尔金的遗产提出了个人请求。一位经纪人告诉我，贝索斯直接给他的两个客户发了电子邮件；亚马逊高管通过在电话中援引他的名字来施加压力。他每天都在询问这个项目的情况。

阅读。为什么亚马逊刚刚花了一大笔钱把《指环王》变成电视？

小时候，贝索斯会在他祖父位于德克萨斯州科图拉的农场度过夏天，在那里他将帮助阉割公牛和安装管道。他还会和他的祖母一起看肥皂剧。但在那些漫长的日子里，他的主要娱乐是科幻小说。一个科幻小说的狂热者向当地图书馆捐赠了大量藏书，贝索斯翻阅了书架上的艾萨克-阿西莫夫和儒勒-凡尔纳。在描述他对科幻作家Iain M. Banks的小说的喜爱时，他曾说："其中有一种乌托邦的元素，我觉得非常有吸引力。" 这句话包含了一丝自知之明。对于他所有的技术官僚本能，对于他所有的工程师和对冲基金的培训，一种浪漫的冲动与他的理性主义共存，有时甚至压倒它。


贝索斯唯一一次与丑闻擦肩而过的机会是在好莱坞，这也许很合适。让他的许多崇拜者感到困惑的是，这一丑闻揭示了一种不守纪律的倾向，这与他创建的公司如此坚定地专注于长期发展，如此致力于实现其价值观的人并不相符。这种混乱中包含的期望是不公平的。虽然文化界有时将贝索斯吹捧为超级英雄，但他终究是一个地球人。当他为自己的企业或社会创造条件时，他并不比其他人更有能力保持冷静。生活在贝索斯创造的世界中，就是生活在他的偏见和偏爱的世界中。

5.0
我不愿意回顾我的亚马逊购买历史，几十年来，我的购买历史充满了值得怀疑的必要性。我家门外的回收箱里塞满了纸板，上面布满了弯曲成微笑的箭头，足以说明一个问题。我有时想象那笑容代表公司在嘲笑我。尽管我有批评亚马逊的记录，但我还是对亚马逊忠心耿耿。

当我们依赖亚马逊的时候，亚马逊就获得了对我们的控制权。通过该网站进行销售，就会受到一套纪律和惩罚制度的约束。亚马逊有效地规定了卖家可以放在一个箱子里的商品数量，以及它将处理的箱子的大小。(为了遵守亚马逊的严格要求，一家宠物食品公司最近将其包装减少了34%）。如果不遵守这些规则，将被罚款。如果一家通过亚马逊市场销售的公司感到受了委屈，它几乎没有追索权，因为其合同放弃了起诉权。这些只是服务条款。

这个把自己打扮成英雄的让-吕克-皮卡德的人建立了一个更像皮卡德的死敌博格的企业，它告诉它的受害者：你将被同化，反抗是徒劳的。
关于亚马逊甚至还有选择的余地吗？这是一个困扰企业的问题，远远多于消费者。耐克等公司多年来一直抵制亚马逊；他们倾注资金建立自己的电子商务网站。但即使耐克没有在亚马逊上销售其产品，在该网站上销售的耐克服装也比其他品牌多。任何人都可以在亚马逊上兜售耐克鞋，而不必解释他们如何获得库存。由于亚马逊市场已经成为连接中国工厂和美国家庭的管道，它也成为假冒商品的渠道，这是耐克公司一直以来的不满。据《连线》报道，在今年的女子世界杯期间，亚马逊最畅销的10件球衣中，有6件似乎是山寨货。为了有希望控制这个市场，耐克得出结论，它别无选择，只能加入其竞争对手。(亚马逊曾表示，它禁止销售假冒产品）。

Stratechery网站的创始人本-汤普森(Ben Thompson)曾精辟地描述了亚马逊的总体计划，该网站是一个对硅谷公司进行活体检测的网站。他认为，该公司希望 "基本上为每个人和每件事提供物流"，因为如果所有东西都通过亚马逊流动，该公司将被定位为对一系列惊人的交易收取 "税"。据报道，当亚马逊销售Showtime和Starz等高级有线电视频道的订阅时，它将获得15%至50%的分成。当一件商品在亚马逊仓库中等待被购买时，卖家要支付一笔租赁费。亚马逊允许卖家在其搜索结果中购买优越的位置（然后它将这些结果标记为赞助），它已经在自己的页面上划分了空间，以便它们可以作为广告被租赁。如果一个企业希望获得亚马逊的规模经济，它就必须支付通行费。这个自诩为英雄的让-吕克-皮卡德的人因此建立了一个更像皮卡德的死敌博格的企业，一个吞噬社会的实体，告诉受害者：你将被同化，反抗是徒劳的。

最后，亚马逊所有令人钦佩和恐惧的东西都汇聚在一起。每件商品都可以在其网站上找到，这使得它成为有史以来最伟大的购物体验。每件商品都可以在其网站上找到，这意味着市场力量危险地集中在一家公司。亚马逊的智能音箱有神奇的力量，可以将口语转化为电子行动；亚马逊的门铃摄像头有能力将视频发送给警方，扩大了监控状态。凭借其独特的管理结构和对价值观的结晶阐述以及对数据的全面收集，亚马逊毫不费力地扩展到新的业务，这是一个令人惊叹和畏缩的理由。杰夫-贝佐斯已经赢得了资本主义。民主的问题是，我们是否可以接受？


在杰夫-贝佐斯位于西德克萨斯州的牧场上，有一座山。在它被挖空的核心里，埋藏着一座由交错的日内瓦轮、杠杆和双金属弹簧组成的层叠的塔。这些还没有完全组装好的内脏将推动 "漫长的现在 "时钟，这个计时器被设计成可以完美地运行一万年，其指针随着世纪的转动而前进。贝索斯已经提供了4200万美元来资助这个时钟的建造，试图将人类从当下的时刻赶走，延长人类的时间感。贝索斯认为，如果人类 "从长计议，我们可以完成一些我们无法完成的事情"。

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亚马逊的绩效评估要求员工说出他们的 "超能力"。雇主也许不应该让人期望其员工拥有超越凡人的品质，但我猜测贝索斯会回答说他有能力思考未来。他纠缠于细节而不牺牲他对最终目的地的清晰度。这就是为什么他可以在推动一家公司掌握杂货业务的同时，推动另一家公司在2024年前将宇航员送上月球，希望人类最终能在这个天体上开采出维持殖民地所需的资源。贝索斯没有希望访问这些殖民地之一，这些殖民地在他死后很久才会出现，但这一事实丝毫不影响他的努力的强度。

请看。杰夫-贝索斯有计划提取月球上的水

唐纳德-特朗普选择杰夫-贝佐斯作为陪衬是很合适的。他们代表了对美国生活中如此多的功能失调的决裂反应。面对这个总统任期内的操纵性情感主义，很难不对一个技术官僚的替代方案产生憧憬，渴望一个有能力和规则的乌托邦。在特朗普搞垮国家的同时，贝索斯建造了一些如约运作的东西。


然而，民主的侵蚀以不同的形式出现。当公共权力采取如此滥用的形式时，不受约束的私人权力可能看起来不是最大的威胁。但是，国家需要像贝索斯那样思考，在允许如此多的责任集中在一个人身上之前，考虑更长远的历史，这个人在没有得到投票的情况下，承担了曾经留给国家的角色。他的公司已经成为国家共享的基础设施；它用机器人塑造了工作场所的未来；它将用无人机填充天空；它的网站决定了哪些行业的繁荣和哪些行业的倒闭。他对太空旅行的投资可能会重塑天际。政治系统没有能力思考他的权力问题，更不用说检查了，这保证了他的长治久安。他专注于远方，因为他知道这属于他。

富兰克林-福尔是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。