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Brad Stone
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Express is more efficient than hiring on your own. And if you're listening to this podcast at work, check out ExpressPros.com to see how Express can take care of your hiring. How do you conclude a legendary business story? The story of a company that started in a garage more than 27 years ago and every single day expands further into our neighborhoods, onto our screens and throughout our lives? How do you wrap up the story of an iconic entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos, who continues to dominate news headlines and stir controversy? As I was pondering this question, a funny thing happened. Jeff Bezos gave us an ending before most people expected. And some bombshell news this evening from Amazon. Jeff Bezos says he's stepping down as CEO. This is one of those Announcements that when it came through today, everyone went, oh my gosh, what's happening? He's leaving. He's leaving the company. As far as day to day operation, Jeff Bezos has announced after quarterly earnings. It was February 2, 2021. In an earnings press release, Amazon shocked the world. It announced that its iconic founder was leaving the CEO role that summer. He would become executive chairman and his protege, a guy named Andy Jassy, who ran Amazon Web Services, would step into the top spot. Bezos said he would remain actively involved in new projects at the company, but he also spoke of other priorities. He sent a memo to all Amazon employees. I asked my colleague to read a selection from it. Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility and it is consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it is hard to put attention on anything else. As executive chair, I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives, but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day One Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, the Washington Post, and my other passions. At the time, Bezos was seemingly at a high point. He was the richest person in the world. Amazon had surpassed a $1 trillion market cap. He had moved past the infamous PR battles with the National Enquirer, and he even seemed to have gotten over any public embarrassment over his divorce. But now Bezos was talking about his interests in philanthropy and his pursuit of space exploration with his private company, Blue Origin. Things at Amazon were getting to be a lot less fun for Bezos. As we covered in previous episodes, sellers in Amazon's marketplace were complaining bitterly about fraud and unfair competition from overseas companies. Delivery service providers, which employed Amazon drivers, were grumbling about how the company pressured them to work at unsafe speeds. Amazon had so many vocal critics in organized labor and on Capitol Hill, and they were weaponizing the exorbitant wealth of the tech giants against them. Here's Rhode Island Congressman David CICILLINI Concluding the 2020 congressional hearings on big tech and antitrust. When these laws were written and monopolists were men named Rockefeller and Carnegie. The names have changed, but the story is the same. Today. The men are named Zuckerberg, Cook, Vercelli and Bezos. Their control of the marketplace allowed them to do whatever it took to crush independent businesses and expand their own power. This must end. Bezos had become an object of ire, even scorn, for his wealth, his power and his life of extraordinary leisure. His successor, Andy Jassy, would at the very least present a humbler target. For Amazon's critics. A handover made sense so what was next for Amazon without its iconic leader? And what was next for Jeff Bezos now that he was free from the daily responsibility of running the company? He seemed to be in the midst of a profound midlife crisis. It involved space travel, a megayacht, and going head to head with his ex wife in the realm of philanthropic giving. You're listening to foundering. I'm your host, Brad Stone. To begin the final act of our story. We start in early 2020 with the COVID 19 pandemic. With stores closing and people quarantining at home, Amazon sales soared. Many people depended on Amazon at this time when they were afraid to leave their homes, which put a terrible strain on its warehouses, endangered the lives of its workers, and kicked off a fre and critical examination of Amazon's labor practices. We'll tell you that story after the break. Okay. Well, we hardly need to relive the early days of COVID It still burned into most of our memories now to growing concerns about the deadly coronavirus. A Washington state resident fell ill after returning from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. Officials now. The first confirmed Covid case in the US Was actually in Seattle, Amazon's backyard. In early March, the majority of the workforce headed home for what would be a brutal extended quarantine. The human toll during this period was horrific, of course, but so was the financial one. The International Monetary Fund estimated that Covid will cost the global economy over $12.5 trillion. That's a staggering number, comparable to the impact of the Great Depression. But at Amazon, exactly the opposite happened. While engineers and other white collar employees went home, workers in the fulfillment centers had to stay at their posts. Here's Derek Palmer, a packer at a warehouse in Staten Island. You go home, all you see is coronavirus. This coronavirus that. Stay safe. When I get to Amazon, there was no talk about coronavirus at all. It was almost as like Amazon didn't know what to do. So they didn't address it at all, you know, which was very alarming because when I'm working, a lot of people will come to me and say, what are we gonna do about this virus? Like they were already coming to me looking for a solution because they didn't have any trust in Amazon. And I myself was lost. I didn't know. Soon, Covid wasn't only something that Derek saw in the news. His colleagues at Staten island called out sick and others showed up to work with symptoms. Derek worked with a guy named Chris Smalls, who would soon become the face of worker dissatisfaction. With Amazon. Here's Chris, the colleague that I work hand in hand with. She was sick. Her eyes were bloodshot red. She was walking around sluggish. She already been there for a number of days for 10 hour shifts. So I know she'd been around hundreds of people already. That was a red flag. I said, you need to go home immediately until your results come back. So Chris tells his bosses that he thinks Covid is in the building, and he was surprised when management told him someone had already tested positive two weeks prior. They told me not to tell anybody that somebody was already positive. They didn't want to cause a panic. It didn't make any sense to me. You're telling me that somebody's been positive in the building two weeks prior? We had no idea. We don't know where they got it from, where it came from, how long it's been in the building. Chris comes out of the meeting and tells Derrick what just happened. Derek said he was surprised. I was shocked. I was like, wait, they don't want workers to know. Why wouldn't they want us to know about the first coronavirus case? And he was just like, look, man, I don't know. This is scary. Amazon was initially secretive about the cases in their warehouses because they wanted to avoid employee panic. A lot of big employers of frontline workers were in the same position. But this would blow back on Amazon in a big way. Late that March, Chris and Derek organized an employee walkout. So then the company told Chris to stay at home because he had possibly been in contact with an infected colleague. But he returned to the building anyway, and he got fired. What happened next would turn Staten island into the epicenter of controversy over Amazon's Covid response. And it would give hope to organized labor, which had been trying unsuccessfully to organize Amazon workers for years. While all this is happening, Jeff Bezos leadership group had a meeting about the situation, and a transcript was leaked to Vice News. In it, Amazon's chief counsel, David Sapolsky, suggested that the company should focus attention on Chris Smalls because he wasn't smart or articulate. I should note that Chris is black, and many critics saw the comment as racially charged. Here's Chris again. I'll never forget that moment. Of course, it definitely upset me, saying these racist remarks. You know, call it what it is. It's definitely a stigma in the black community calling us not smart or articulate. The leaked transcript was a huge story. It gave people a rare look inside Amazon's leadership team, where the focus appeared to be on stopping a fledgling union movement rather than listening to the safety concerns of workers. Later, Sapolsky, the chief attorney, apologized for his comments. He said he hadn't known Chris was black. He told me I shouldn't have used that characterization for any Amazon employee. It was incredibly regrettable. As for Chris, he threw himself into union organizing, ironically, they said, to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against Amazon. And from that moment forward, that's when I really started to get involved in organizing on a larger scale nationwide. And now I'm trying to make them eat those words. As of this recording, in April 2022, Chris and Derek led Amazon employees to victory in the union election in New York City. It marks organized labor's first ever foothold in Amazon in the US A historic win that will now lead to an epic negotiating a contract with the company to improve the lives of its workers. Almost two years to the day after he was fired by Amazon, Chris stood in front of a group of supporters and popped champagne to the first union in American history. Let's go. Do you have a message for Jeff Bezos? Oh, we want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up. Yeah, we was signing up. He's out here getting. He's thanking Bezos for going to space because while the former CEO was distracted, Chris was building a union. This could mean big changes for Amazon, unless they somehow get it overturned in court. The implications are huge. Unions can make it harder for Amazon to dictate things like the length of breaks and when employees are compelled to work extra time. This is the kind of flexibility that Amazon depends on to meet those unexpected surges and lulls in online shopping. It's a significant challenge to their business model. But back in 2020, Chris Smalls also succeeded in drawing lots of attention to Amazon's pandemic response. 60 Minutes dispatched a crew to check it out, which is never a good sign. The journalist Lesley Stahl interviewed Chris as well as Dave Clark, the executive who built the Amazon transportation network and now ran the entire retail part of the company. So how many positive cases have you discovered at Amazon? The actual sort of total number of cases isn't particularly useful because it's relative to the size of the building and then the overall community infection rates. So you don't know or you're just not going to tell us how many cases have been discovered? I mean, we know I don't have the number right on me at this moment because it's not a particularly useful number. It wasn't a good look. People wanted to know what was going on inside Amazon's warehouses. Finally, the company did reveal its Covid numbers later that year. About 20,000 of its 1.4 million workers had gotten sick by the fall of 2020. And that number didn't include the drivers, who are contractors, not employees. Amazon argued this was lower than the infection rate in surrounding communities and that many of these employees could have gotten ill at home instead of work. In August 2022, an Amazon spokesperson gave us this. We are monitoring the situation closely and will continue to follow local government guidance and work closely with leading medical healthcare professionals. Now, I spent a lot of time reporting on Amazon's pandemic response for my book. And I think the problem was they had two competing serving customers and protecting workers. They did institute safety precautions in the warehouses, like social distancing and COVID testing. But it was really impossible to do both, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, and because serving customers has always been Amazon's guiding principle. Again, it came first. I remember feeling surprised by how engaged Jeff Bezos was. From his ranch in West Texas, he led weekly meetings devoted to Covid and and employee safety. Amazon hired epidemiologists to guide them through the crisis. Bezos wanted to convey the image of a CEO in control and sympathetic to the plight of employees. In April, he visited an Amazon warehouse and a Whole Foods Market in Dallas, his first public visit to the front line in years. Nice to meet you, sir. Hello, how are you doing? That shield's working out pretty good. Try. That's what we need. Thank you. But this was a PR battle that Amazon really couldn't win. Amazon's sales jumped during the crisis. Amazon's market capitalization increased by about $700 billion in 2020. And Jeff Bezos personal net worth rose by about $75 billion. So at a time when people and businesses were suffering and employees were panicking, Amazon and Bezos were thriving. It felt unsettling that the very thing that was shutting down the world was filling the company's coffers. Navigating this PR maelstrom was one of the biggest challenges Bezos had ever faced. And just eight months later, he decided to step down from the CEO job. I don't think the pandemic is necessarily the reason he left, but certainly it was another illustration that running the company was getting to be a lot less fun. And Bezos did want to have fun. He wanted to have adventures. He wanted to embrace the kind of risk that might scare the shareholders of a Big publicly traded company like Amazon, he wanted to go to space. We'll visit Van Horne, Texas, for Jeff Bezos highly controversial trip to space next. In July 2021, my colleague Spencer Soper and I traveled to Van Horn, Texas. It's a small town of about 2,000 people. When you drive around, you see trailer parks and roadside motels. Bezos owns a massive ranch about 40 minutes away. It's 165,000 acres of mountains and brush that resembles his grandfather's Texas ranch, where he spent idyllic summers as a child. He secretly scouted this land back in 2003, then later announced his plan to a local newspaper. He wanted to build a launch site on the property for his private space company, Blue Origin. Spencer and I were in Van Horn to witness something pretty wild. Yep, just a few weeks after he formally departed the CEO job at Amazon, Bezos was leaving Earth. Here's Spencer, who brought along a microphone to document this unusual event. Just getting checked into Van Horn, Texas, and folks in town, you know, some are pretty stoked about it. And some, you know, meh, not so much. You know, some say they'd rather have have rain than a spaceship. Been dealing with some drought for a while. Many of the townspeople seem completely unaware of this billionaire space project. Spencer met Barbara while he was pumping gas. Jeff Bezos. People know much about him down here? Not really. Not that I'm aware of. Do you. Do you shop on Amazon? Yes, I do. So he runs that company. Oh, really? He founded it, yeah. Really? Yeah. That's the guy going to space. He's the guy who founded that company. Founded. Okay. Okay. Well, shows you how much I know. That's how he made his money. Wow. Spencer also caught up with local sheriff Arvin west the night before the launch at a small cantina outside Van Horn. The sheriff, who had other things on his mind, was not impressed. Eh, I don't know. It never blew my skirt up. So wasn't never no big deal to me. All the billionaires are going to space. Maybe they'll stay there. There's actually a petition say don't let him back. One thing about it. We don't have to worry about them checking their green card coming in. They won't even do that for the border. Well, that's one guy's opinion anyway. We were not alone in Van Horn that week. Reporters and satellite TV trucks descended on the scene. Rockets make for pretty compelling television. And there was always the possibility that Bezos and his colleagues might die in a fiery crash. Here's a Pretty dark confession. I actually had to pre write his obituary just in case. Here's Spencer again. So Jeff Bezos will be fulfilling his boyhood dream today. He's 57 now. He said he's been dreaming about space travel since he was 5 years old. And this is basically an expedition he can take due to his wealth created from founding Amazon.com, which is now the world's largest retailer. Today's rocket won't go into orbit. It will go into suborbital space, letting the astronauts experience a few minutes of weightlessness. At 2 in the morning, Spencer and I met up with the other journalists at the local community center. Rental car headlights glowed in the parking lot blue. Origin had been working on the New Shepard rocket for about 15 years and conducted 15 unmanned flights. This was the first one with people on board. Bezos was a guinea pig of sorts along with three others. His younger brother Mark, an astronaut trainee in her 80s and an 18 year old. July actually turned out to be a frenzied month for the space tourism industry. Bezos launch was nine days after Richard Branson had his launch with Virgin Galactic. A key goal of space pioneers like Bezos, Branson and Elon Musk is creating spaceships that can be reused like airplanes. Rather than plunging into the ocean, the rocket booster lands upright and can be flown over and over again. This lowers the cost of space travel and makes the commercialization and exploration of space more feasible. New Shepard took off at a little after 8am Texas time. Watching it, watching any rocket launch is a pretty profound experience. You think of human potential, incredible scientific achievement and of course the safety of the people on board. I just have to add the New Shepard is extraordinarily phallic looking. 5, 4. Command engine start. 2, 1. Of course, Bezos and his crew landed safely. After the launch, we got on buses again to go to another facility for the post trip press conference. A country western soundtrack was playing on a loop and I remember thinking how choreographed the entire day was like. Bezos wanted to conjure images of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Bezos showed up in a cowboy hat. Reporters crammed onto folded chairs on one side of the room and the astronaut's family sat on the other side. Onto how it felt. Oh my God. My expectations were high and they were dramatically exceeded. But when you get up above the atmosphere, what you see is it's actually incredibly thin. It's this tiny little fragile thing. And as we move about the planet we're damaging it. That's very profound. It's one Thing to recognize that intellectually, it's another thing to actually, you see with your own eyes. This was the most excited I've ever seen. Bezos. He was almost like a kid, but he made one comment that ruffled some feathers. He was trying to make a joke while conveying gratitude toward the people who facilitated Amazon's rise, which created his fortune. I also, I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this. This is what Chris Smalls was talking about after his union win. We played this tape in a previous episode. Remember, an Amazon delivery person said he quit when he heard it because Bezos said this just months after the controversies around Amazon's pandemic response and the dangers to warehouse workers. It went over very poorly. Afterwards, we had a chance to go to the launch site and snap more photos. Then Bezos made a surprise appearance. He was on a convoy of electric trucks made by Rivian, a startup that Amazon invested in, and ordered 100,000 electric delivery trucks from. This was a victory lap, and he was clearly relishing the attention. Reporters shouted questions at Bezos. That's great. So Bezos just showed up with the other three astronauts, and they're walking onto the landing pad. How soon do you want to go back? It looks like it's ready to go. Fuel her up. You want to come? You coming? How much is it going to cost me? How much? We take it in the middle of the scrum. Spencer, bless him, took his shot. See you later, guys. Thank you. What a great day. Hey, give us an update on the billion in stock you got to sell to bankroll it. We heard that one last four years ago. He looked at me, got into the car, shut the door, and drove off. You know, I think it was slim pickings on questions today. Bezos was driving away from the press, but he wasn't leaving the public stage. This was his future, not conducting company meetings in Seattle conference rooms. In fact, I thought the most revealing thing he said at the press conference was when he was asked how he was now going to focus his time. Yes. So I'm going to split my time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund. Those two things. And there's going to be a third thing and maybe a fourth thing, but I don't know what those are yet. I'm not very good at doing one thing. Did you notice he didn't mention Amazon? I think this surprised some people. Back in Seattle, Bezos feet were leaving the earth, literally and kind of figuratively, too. He now belonged To a different orbit of space dreams, celebrities, global travel with his girlfriend and their life of extraordinary wealth. As for Amazon, well, it was now Andy Jassy's company. The deputy would have to find his own way. We'll tell that story next. So Jeff Bezos announced he was stepping down from the CEO role. And I remember a lot of commentators assuming he's going to stay involved. Of course, Bezos was a famous micromanager. It just seemed impossible that he would change his style and be hands off at the company he nurtured for two decades. But after the space launch, basically Bezos devoted himself to his charity. He also went on vacation and popped up in places like Hawaii, Greece, Bora Bora and Mexico. It became pretty clear for the first time ever, Amazon was going to have to make its way without its founder. Andy Jassy was the new guy in charge. I've known Jassy for years and followed his career. He's an impressive executive. He built AWS into the most profitable and fastest growing part of Amazon. And he learned directly from Bezos, in part by following him around everywhere during Amazon's early days as his chief of staff. But as Amazon made its way through the COVID crisis, it became apparent that the company needed something more. Someone who could mend its relationship with employees and fix its reputation among regulators, the press and customers. Jasias tried to thread this needle. A few days before he took over Amazon, the company added two new entries to its list of leadership principles. These are the codes that govern all decisions, like who gets hired and promoted. The new principles were strive to be Earth's best employer and success and scale bring broad responsibility. These are some pretty lofty goals. In other words, Amazon was finally acknowledging its critics. For its first 27 years, satisfying the almighty customer had been the company's first and only North Star. Now it was admitting that workers were another crucial constituency. Here's Jassy speaking at an internal Amazon event called Deep Dive in July of 2021. So if I start with Strive to be Earth's best employer, I think that we always felt like it was self evident that we cared about employees and that we cared about building the best place to work and we cared about our culture. But, you know, as we step back, we kind of thought it made sense to be a little bit more intentional here at this point and to make it clearer to employees that this was something we were going to focus on. But keeping all those workers happy and motivated, particularly amid the great resignation, was going to be costly. In the span of A few months, the company raised its starting hourly wage for new hires to an average $18 an hour. It also doubled base pay for new office and tech workers. As a result, Amazon's expenses went way up. And as the pandemic faded, shoppers started to return to stores. So Amazon's stock price started to stagnate. Yeah, Amazon shares sliding, of course. Online sales, not that great. Weakest growth since the start of the pandemic. So, huge boost that they got. Starting to fade. Another challenge is continuing to invent new products. Remember Alexa, the Kindle and AWS pretty much sprang from Jeff Bezos head. It remains to be seen if Jassy is an inventor at anywhere near the same level. It's the Amazon Astro, kind of like an Alexa on wheels that can follow you around the house. Early in Jassy's tenure, Amazon announced a $1,000 rolling home robot that uses Alexa called Astro. But strangely, as of this recording, Amazon really hasn't started selling it yet. Another thing to watch is whether Jassy pushes Amazon further into the health care industry. The global health market is huge, an estimated $12 trillion. It's also pretty technologically backwards, so it's a big opportunity, but that's still really hypothetical. So can Jassy pull it off, impress Amazon investors once again and write the next chapter of this epic business story? If he does, it probably won't be due to guidance from his mentor. By the beginning of 2022, it really felt like Bezos had moved on. He was 58. After the rocket launch, he bought a massive vacation property on Maui. For 78 million. He built one of the largest yachts in the world, which cost an estimated 500 million. He also sent TV personality Michael Strahan and Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, on the same Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space. The most profound experience I can. I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened. I just. It's extraordinary. Shatner clearly enjoyed the ride, but there was a lot of mockery of these launches, particularly from late night comedians who couldn't get over the rocket's conspicuously phallic shape. Captain, it's a giant testicle. It's the Lake show with Stephen Colbert. Meanwhile, Bezos tried to improve his image by drawing attention to his increased philanthropic activities. Here he is in the fall of 2021 at the UN Climate Conference. Nature provides. It gives us life. It is beautiful, but it is also fragile. I was reminded of this when I went into space with Blue origin. Bezos earmarked $10 billion to fighting climate change. In 2021, he was the 16 biggest philanthropist, according to Forbes. Now, whatever you think of that ranking, it was significantly overshadowed by the person at number five, his ex wife, Mackenzie. She changed her last name from Bezos to Scott after the divorce. Mackenzie said she wanted to give her money away as fast as possible. And alongside her donations, she published thoughtful online essays where she almost seemed to be trolling her ex husband. Here's my colleague reading a particularly pointed passage. We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others. It's actually quite savage. She's implying that her $60 billion fortune in divorce, divorce money came from a rigged system rather than Bezos ingenuity and inventiveness. And that the uber wealthy are the wrong people to fix the world's problems. She almost seemed to be siding with her ex husband's fiercest critics. It's funny, back in the day, Bezos always praised Mackenzie's intelligence. He liked to say she was smart enough to get him out of a third world jail. Now here she was, effectively relegating him to a new sort of prison, one built on a critique that his fortune was earned in an unfair system. If Bezos cared about this, he never showed it. He became prolific on Instagram, documenting a new life. He was frolicking in Hawaii with Lauren Sanchez, riding luxury yachts, partying with other celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and the Rock. And in the stands at the super bowl, he looked like he was having a great time. To a longtime Bezos watcher, I have to say, this was just so surprising. Bezos had started his technology career as a focused, kind of nerdy business leader. He was disciplined. He stayed out of the limelight. And he evangelized long term thinking, not living in the moment. Remember way back when Bezos explained his regret minimization framework? It was all about looking back with pride on your accomplishments when you're 80. And he said he didn't believe in carpe diem, making the most of the present day with little thought of the future. It was not carpe diem. It was not wine, women, and song. No, no, no, no. I don't go in for carpe diem. I go in for regret minimization framework. Absolutely. Well, Bezos seemed to have embraced carpe diem. He ended up as an entirely different person. I guess in some ways it's fitting. The Amazon story is, after all, the story of dramatic change, how one company transformed the way we all shop, read, and even the character of our communities. So it makes sense that this is also the story of how one person, Jeff Bezos, was also changed. It's interesting that so many people are disappointed by this current incarnation of Bezos. I feel a little let down at times, too. I think that those of us who admired him for his inventiveness or his business acumen feel that he's kind of wasting his talent. His extreme wealth almost amounts to having a superpower. And I think we want to see our superheroes use their powers to save the world, not to fly around to vacation spots or to retreat to a mega yacht. Maybe Bezos will recommit to Amazon on one day. Maybe Andy Jassy won't need his help. Or maybe Bezos will apply his keen intellect and deep resources to not only going to space, but to really getting into the trenches in the fight against climate change with the same success as he's had building Amazon. Whatever you think of Jeff Bezos and his greatest creation, we should probably all be rooting for him to float back down to earth. This season of foundering was hosted by me, Brad Stone, Sean Wen is our executive producer. Spencer Soper contributed reporting to this episode. Ray Mondo is our audio engineer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Mark Million, Anne Vanderme, Robin Agello and Molly Schutz are our story editors. Special thanks to Mark Bergen, Ilina Peng and Brody Ford. Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends. See you next season.