Understanding Amazon

Book review of AMAZON UNBOUND: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

After I finished Amazon Unbound, I glanced at the Amazon Echo cylinder on my kitchen counter, next to a few cans of dog food that had just arrived from Amazon. Instead of the device, I imagined before me the sleek, smoothly bald and evenly tanned face of Jeff Bezos, eyes peering serenely back at me from below the glowing LED halo.

That minor hallucination made sense because — as we learn from Brad Stone’s portrait of Amazon and its founder — Alexa, the voice coming out of my Echo, more or less is Jeff Bezos. He came up with the idea of a smart speaker in January 2011, back in the era of Google Plus and the iPod Shuffle. Bezos emailed his top deputies that month and declared, “We should build a $20 device with its brains in the cloud that’s completely controlled by our voice.”

For the next nearly four years, he micromanaged the project, pushing teams in Atlanta and Gdansk to make speech recognition seamless. He put in place a surreal testing protocol that involved hiring temps to spend days in empty apartments chattering away to silent speakers, and berated executives who told him it would take decades to develop speech recognition. He took home an early Echo prototype and when, in a moment of frustration, he told it to go “shoot yourself in the head,” it sent a wave of panic through the engineers who were listening in. He even came up with the idea for the LED ring on top, Mr Stone writes, and with the name “Alexa” (in homage to the ancient library of Alexandria).

Mr Stone’s new volume is a sequel of sorts to his 2013 best seller, The Everything Store, which introduced Mr Bezos and explained his single-minded drive to take over online commerce. It is particularly valuable in explaining how the company makes money. The book is also very much a biography of Mr Bezos, who recently announced he will be stepping down as CEO before the end of the year.

As biography, the book is both limited and perhaps strengthened by the fact that Mr Stone has lost his access to Mr Bezos, whom he interviewed for The Everything Store. Mr Stone writes that he learned the CEO was angry he had tracked down his biological father for that book.

AMAZON UNBOUND: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

Author: Brad Stone

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $30; Pages: 478

There’s an old journalistic saying that access is a curse, because it puts the author in debt to his source and brings him too close to the person he’s covering. Amazon Unbound does suffer at times from a lack of psychological insight but benefits from the author’s distance, and makes for a dense, at times juicy tour of the company Mr Bezos built.

At Amazon, nearly every big decision comes down to a meeting with Mr Bezos, at which his deputies hold their breaths, genuinely uncertain of whether he will tear up their proposals or double their budgets. Some of his fixations, like Alexa, are visionary. Others are quirky: After reading that a single hamburger can contain meat from a hundred different cows, he decided that Amazon’s fledgling grocery business would distinguish itself by offering a “single-cow burger.” Once his aides got past thinking their boss was joking, they set to work.

Mr Stone solves some of the mystery behind Amazon’s HQ2 debacle, in which the company announced plans to build a giant new office complex in Queens, then pulled out in the face of local opposition. That New York City was even a possibility was the result of a decision by Mr Bezos to throw out months of careful study and go instead with his gut. One of the last-minute additions to the plans were the helipads. Mr Bezos once hated helicopters, but all of a sudden they were cropping up everywhere. And it was during this period that he’d grown close to a former actress named Lauren Sanchez, a charismatic pilot who ran an aviation company.

Mr Bezos is at his most human in the sections where Mr Stone describes how he fell for Ms Sanchez, courting her so publicly that he was sure to get caught. So it’s hard not to root for Mr Bezos when, trapped by The Enquirer, he lures the publication into sending him a menacing letter — then cheekily publishes it and exposes the minor scandal himself.

But Mr Bezos isn’t your average victim of tabloid extortion. He’s the world’s richest man, and has recently fashioned himself as a champion of uppercase “Truth” and “Democracy” by saving The Washington Post. Mr Bezos speculated publicly on the possible political motives behind the revelation of his affair, Mr Stone writes, and tried to shift attention from the tawdriness and toward the brutal murder of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

This was, at best, reasonable paranoia; and at worst, a truly cynical bit of public relations, cashing in on a journalist’s murder to distract from a tabloid scandal. His “noble sentiment,” Mr Stone comments dryly, “had little to do with his yearlong open conduct of an extramarital relationship.” Mr Bezos’ wealth and power will always protect him, but there’s a flip side, too: They can also taint anything he touches.

©2021 The New York Times News Service