Artful dodger

When Bezos announced he was stepping down as the top man at Amazon at the beginning of February to be replaced by the former head of Amazon’s cloud computing services division, Andy Jassy, it was like a race to see who could say they’d haul the new guy up to Congress first. “I look forward to talking to him about competition issues,” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said menacingly in her capacity as head of the antitrust subcommittee. Jassy, meanwhile, had been the one in charge of Amazon Web Services when it effectively made the decision to silence the Twitter clone Parler, an app popular with conservatives, after the Capitol riot. Amazon said that Parler had become “a very real risk to public safety.”

Nothing had been said on Parler that hadn’t been said on Twitter and Facebook, but Parler was specifically identified with right-wing nuts and therefore an easy target. Right-of-center voices were given another reason to suspect Big Tech won’t be satisfied until it has tilted the playing field so far that conservatives are rolling backward down it. Just about any other successor Bezos might have picked, in other words, would probably have been less incendiary.

That raises the possibility that Bezos isn’t stepping down so much as stepping out of the way of public accountability. He isn’t leaving the company but rather taking a role as executive chairman, perhaps a nominally less chiefly position, so that when somebody from Amazon needs to go to Washington for a ritual public beating before one subcommittee or another, it’s Jassy’s problem. As the Washington Post reported, Amazon’s finance chief commented that “Jeff is really not going anywhere.” It’s “more a restructuring of who is doing what.”

That might make Bezos-Jassy more like Putin-Medvedev, when the Russian leaders switched their titles but Vladimir Putin stayed in real charge — what Russians called a rokirovka, for the castling maneuver in chess.

The key question here is, what will change at Amazon now? And it’s a difficult question to answer, precisely because of the way Bezos has kept himself as more of an enigma than, say, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, both of whom have had a harder time hiding from Congress and the public.

The danger in not defining yourself clearly, however, is that the public will be left to fill in the blanks. This doesn’t seem to bother Bezos specifically, but it has resulted in competing versions of him. In much of the public mind, as constructed and contrived by narrativizing mainstream journalists, he is the rapacious capitalist out of some combination of Dickens and a Democratic Socialists of America meeting, damnable for his success at turning the logistics operation he built to sell books online in the ’90s into an everything store. Internet culture has jokingly dubbed him “Lord Bezos,” because he runs an empire as close to a private government as anything else can be. In the not-so-brave new world of the pandemic, an information economy worker could live a life serviced almost entirely by Bezos-owned services. Work for a company hosted on Amazon’s cloud computing services or sell products on its store, buy pantry items online or venture out to Whole Foods, which Amazon owns, and don’t stream so much on Amazon Prime Video that you forget to renew your prescriptions on Amazon Pharmacy. Go out for a drive these days, and you’ll see Amazon trucks as much as USPS in much of America, connecting Bezos’s services to every home in the country.

But what kind of man is this? We know he is grandiose, and we know he is a nerd, and we know that both aspects of his personality are often expressed together. When you arrive at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, you see Bezos’s Blue Origin space company, which he apparently funds with more than a billion dollars a year, across the street, looking almost intentionally like a rival. In a West Texas desert mountain, Bezos built a 500-foot-tall clock that ticks once a year and rings once a millennium. This is a monument to his ambition but also to his remoteness, something whose significance seems built for a future he won’t experience. This is in stark contrast to his fellow billionaire nerds, such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who seem much more urgent and frenetic in the mark they are trying to leave on this world. Musk launches his company’s electric sports cars to space as a marketing gimmick, and Gates pushes for his fellow billionaires to give away their fortunes in large philanthropic programs. Bezos seems untroubled not to be such a figurehead in either field, except by default. He’s content to say Blue Origin has world-changing things coming, and that he’ll give scads of money away effectively eventually.

The debate over Amazon’s labor practices is key to understanding the way pundits on the Left translate the Bezos Rorschach. Critical journalists, populist politicians, and even TV shows such as South Park regularly criticize the company, which is currently catching a huge amount of national flak for fighting a unionizing campaign in Alabama. Amazon workers surely do need less grueling surveillance of how many breaks they take. But it seems to me this is an attempt to project an anachronistic labor politics from a period when federal law did much less for workers and organized labor action did much more. Meanwhile, as to the balance of power arranged against management, the political center-left wants to rule Amazon’s very existence illegal using antitrust action. The idea is that Amazon can afford to sell things so cheaply, and even at a loss when competitors start to grow into some part of the market, that it represents a monopoly, which would mean the federal government could order the company to break itself up into pieces. Of course, Amazon is in competition with all kinds of other retailers in various markets, from Netflix in streaming video to Wayfair in cheapo furniture to Walmart in being a giant megacorporation accused of being a monopoly that uses economies of scale to out-compete all of its competitors and dominate American retailing.

Surely, the distressingly commonplace line of thinking goes, any American internet company’s success can be explained by how greedily it withholds pay from its workers. Is this a clue into the true psyche of the Amazon founder? It seems to me that the nearly $2 trillion valuation Amazon critics imagine could be spread around more equally would not actually be worth that much if Amazon were not such an efficient business. Most of Bezos’s personal wealth is in stock of a company that would either be worth less per share or not exist if he hadn’t been such a ruthless competitor in the various businesses he operates in (which is virtually all of them). Almost every day, I see a fiscally illiterate headline or meme claiming something like this: “Jeff Bezos could give all Amazon workers $105,000 and still be as rich as pre-COVID.” This claim feels true to people who have an unhealthy relationship to other people’s money, but it isn’t. If Bezos liquidated that much Amazon stock, Amazon stock would drop, and he, the company, the employees, and the various shareholders, pension funds, and all kinds of other things invested in it would lose money. Inequality is bad, and generosity is good, but stupidity is self-defeating.

Ruthlessness, greed, withholding, selfishness, anti-worker callousness — it’s all supposedly obvious to Amazon’s critics, yet they’re still losing the battle over the company’s public image to Bezos. In 2018, the American Institutional Confidence Poll, run through Georgetown University, found Amazon is the second-most trusted institution in American life after the military. Reporting on the survey, Vox noted that “Americans have more confidence in Amazon than they do the government or the press.” And then, in a note of presumptuous, Voxy exasperation, “But why?”

I might suggest two reasons. First, it is actually a healthy part of the American spirit to distrust the government and the press. They can draft us into wars and ruin reputations and therefore should be regarded, at the warmest, with suspicion. But second, consider the possibility that Amazon has actually earned the public trust. It’s not a complicated political thing. People like cheap stuff. They like getting it simply. They like it coming quickly. They like it showing up in a little box that reminds them, with a smiling arrow from A to Z, that they can get whatever else they want. Amazon may be a ruthless megacorporation bent on world domination whose founder once said he wants to move all life on Earth off-planet and render the home planet (to which the phrase “Blue Origin” refers) a spherical celestial national preserve. But it saved me a chore on Wednesday. It lightens my load. And practicality beats ideology for normal people every time.

In 2018, Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop BEZOS Act (short for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies” Act), a largely symbolic bit of populist theatrics meant to criticize the online megamarket for how many of its employees receive federal welfare.

Or was it symbolic? It couldn’t get through Washington, but it got to Amazon HQ. The next month, Bezos announced he’d taken the criticism on and he’d raise Amazon’s minimum wage nationwide to $15 for all workers, including part-time and seasonal ones. More than this, much more than this, Amazon actually announced it would start lobbying the federal government to go higher than $15, so all of Amazon’s competitors would have to exceed the wages Bernie now had to compliment Amazon for agreeing to.

There are a couple ways to read this episode. Reading No. 1: Bezos gave in to blackmail and pressure and/or saw the light about generosity toward workers’ inherent value. To describe why this reading isn’t plausible, let’s get into another little episode in Bezosology, the d— pic saga. The National Enquirer, run by the extraordinarily named David Pecker, tried to extort Bezos. Bezos had been cheating on his longtime wife MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott, post-divorce), and the Enquirer had gotten the dirt. Pecker had paparazzi pictures of Bezos traveling around with his mistress, TV personality Lauren Sanchez, as well as surreptitiously acquired private communications — that is, “sexts.”

Pecker sent the material to Bezos, threatening to publish and offering not to, what’s called a catch-and-kill scheme in the even-sleazier-than-usual world of tabloid journalism. He’d been assuming it would be worth more to Bezos that the Enquirer didn’t publish it than it would be worth to the Enquirer’s readers. Big mistake. Bezos, the supposedly press-averse sphinx, published his own blackmail note on Medium, breaking the story on himself, breaking up his marriage and costing himself a some $35 billion divorce settlement that was widely reported as “the costliest in history” (although Henry VIII’s did come at a fairly high price).

Are we, then, supposed to believe that Jeff Bezos is incapable of standing up to financial or moral blackmail? I think not. There’s another answer to why he might have given in to Bernie’s fight for Amazon to pay $15, and it is that it was good business practice combined with good PR. In Brad Stone’s 2013 book about Amazon’s rise and Bezos’s background, The Everything Store, one of the themes that emerge is Bezos’s willingness to take a short-term loss and let people see him wrongly, for example as meek and more interested in technical computer issues than business world domination, if it means long-term success. For a time, he assured potential investors that Amazon has a 70% chance of failing, but the forthright acceptance of his own limitations was performed in service of a breathtakingly ambitious plan. One vivid anecdote has Bezos buying the entire Toys R Us stock of Pokemon merchandise before Christmas in 1999. Amazon gives profits to its competitor, but it establishes itself as the go-to place to buy toys, not just books, online. Meanwhile, Toys R Us gave Amazon bulk free shipping, and its customers were frustrated. You’ve gotta spend money to take money.

Sanders may not be capitalistic of mind enough to perceive it, but Jeff Bezos certainly does: Labor is a market too. The real minimum wage is always zero, as Thomas Sowell quipped. Now that Amazon has comfortable dominance in mutually beneficial market spaces ranging from e-tail to high-end groceries (Amazon bought Whole Foods in June 2017) to cloud computing, with large annual profits, it can afford the $15 that competitors can’t afford while they grow. (To say nothing of potential competitors that might, as Amazon once was, be a mere dream by someone smart working in a garage.)

Bezos had followed Henry Ford’s simple formulation: “There is one rule for the industrialist, and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” And he’d shown that if you have more money, the highest wages possible are just one more monopsonistic competitive advantage. He’d made Sanders a fool of Amazon public relations.

That, really, is the story of Bezos and Amazon: a man who keeps finding ways to give people what they want, even when they hate him for it. The press don’t like when Bezos makes money, or when he loses money; they don’t like when he spends it, or when he gives it away. The Right doesn’t like how he manages content. The Left doesn’t like how he manages labor. He gets attacked for acting like an actual human being with down-to-earth flaws, and for acting like an aloof alien whose sole interests are in the stars. Well, all right. Many of the criticisms are perfectly fair, but they don’t leave us any closer to a consensus on who or what Jeff Bezos is.

What if he really isn’t a hero or a villain at all? What if the heart of the matter is that it’s just a really good idea to make it simple to buy things in one click on the internet for a little less money, and now, he’s rich and successful? Maybe this one’s just not very complicated.

Every episode in the saga of Bezos’s relentless missions to build Amazon’s reach and to build his giant, multi-multi-multibillionaire versions of high school science projects makes more sense if you simply refuse to read them through the ordinary politics lens they are presented through, and instead assume that the public largely sees Amazon as a positive force in people’s lives. Bezos’s mishandling of the intersection of cloud computing and speech regulation is seen as an outgrowth of that, and forgiven by the public more easily than when those infractions are committed by those in Silicon Valley whose entire business is speech. Amazon has a responsibility to get this right — nobody forced Bezos into this position of power — but it’s easy to see why the public has some patience with it.

Looked at this way, the riddle of Bezos dissipates, and you can see him as merely a kind of strange computer and shipping logistics expert who got into the right business and then consistently made rational decisions about his interests, which are nerdy space stuff, not being in the press too much, growing his company, and at least one too many women. The only thing world-historical about him and his achievements is their scale. His greatest sin against the current culture may have been the fact that Jeff Bezos isn’t very much fun to hate. He makes even that cheap.

Nicholas Clairmont is a Washington Examiner contributor and associate editor of Arc Digital.