By James Pethokoukis and Brad Stone

While the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a recession on the
American economy, Amazon has weathered the storm and then some. To many, Amazon’s
streaming services and fast shipping have made it a lifesaver during the
pandemic. But the company’s success has drawn criticism from others. And with
the recent departure of company founder Jeff Bezos at the helm of Amazon, the
tech giant’s future is open to speculation. What will the coming years hold for
Amazon? And with his shift in focus toward space, what’s in store for Jeff
Bezos? In a recent episode of Political Economy, I discussed these questions
and more with Brad Stone.

Brad is the senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News, as well as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of four books, the most recent of which is Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, released last May.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You
can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

I would recommend your previous book, The Everything Store, to listeners. It makes a fantastic companion to Amazon Unbound. What did you find so compelling about this story that you wanted to devote a whole lot of time to talking and writing more about it?

I was talking about Amazon a lot and came to realize that it
was all outdated. The company that I had written about in 2013 was a giant and
was interesting, but it had a $100 billion market cap with maybe 40,000 or
50,000 employees. Bezos was interesting, but certainly wasn’t the most famous
guy in business.

And that all shifted. The market cap zoomed to $1.5
trillion, and Bezos became the richest person in the world and changed before
our very eyes — physically, his personal life, the things that he was
interested in. And when I started Amazon Unbound, I certainly didn’t know that
he was going to retire as CEO, get divorced, or further commit to his private
space company, Blue Origin. So the landscape was changing, and I needed to
update my history.

When people used to think about Jeff Bezos in the early
days of Amazon, they thought of the guffawing laugh — he was really a charming
character. Now he’s depicted as Lex Luther. How did that happen?

Maybe we have to disassociate our generalized distaste for
extraordinary wealth at a time of huge and worrying income inequality with the
particulars of Bezos. He obviously gets criticized — and duly so — in my book
and elsewhere for Amazon’s relationship with its employees, the corporate
culture, and some of the pressures that it’s exerting on small businesses.

And for all of Amazon’s faults, I don’t think I would have
written two books if I didn’t generally believe that, in the end, it’s brought
a lot of conveniences to our lives. It’s got a lot of things it needs to fix,
but it’s also managed to innovate at scale and obviously was a complete
lifeline during the pandemic. So I don’t really think that it’s fair to call
him a Lex Luther type.

I will say, he can do a fairly poor job of evangelizing for
his own interests — like at the recent space launch, when he inadvertently
thanked Amazon employees for paying for the whole thing.

Did Jeff Bezos think — and does current management think
— that they have a PR problem? Or do they just think business reporters, the
media, and politicians like to attack the company, but actual customers and
regular people think Amazon’s great?

I would point to the last Bezos shareholder letter and some
of the things that Andy Jassy has said recently. They’ve added a couple of
principles to their 14 sacrosanct leadership values. They talk about being more
employee-centric and employee-focused, and also about looking at some of the
possible ramifications of their actions for society. To me, that suggests a
receptiveness to the criticism.

So I don’t think they’re fully in their shells of denial,
even if it’s sometimes their public posture to say “Okay sure, people are
going to criticize us. They just don’t understand.” So I do think that
maybe some of the attempts to be a friendlier Amazon are in response to a
criticism that they do see as a bit of an existential problem.

Elon Musk and Bezos are two very, very wealthy
individuals, but with very different personalities. And the same goes for their
space ambitions. Any thoughts on those differences?

Putting aside all the space tourism and suborbital flights
we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, Blue Origin is competing and trying
to catch up with SpaceX for contracts to send orbital rockets into space, carry
commercial and government satellites, and take astronauts to the space station
and then ultimately to the moon. And Blue Origin keeps losing those contracts
and then protesting. That’s because New Glenn, their rocket, is years away from
fruition, and SpaceX has a complete collection of functioning rockets.

But the long-term goal is different. Musk thinks that to
ensure humanity’s survival, we need to be a multi-planetary species. So he
wants to go to Mars and set up a colony there. Bezos’ long-term goal is to have
huge space stations orbiting the earth, comprised of material from the moon and
harvesting the energy of the sun. It’s like we have these two science fiction
geeks who read different books and have different visions.

Is Bezos going to keep putting resources towards Blue
Origin because this is his legacy?

We’re talking during a week in which Bezos wrote an open
letter to the NASA administrator, basically pledging $2 billion of his own
money to cover the development of a moon lander, because NASA only had the
funding to go and award SpaceX the contract. So this guy is in it for the long
term.

The question, I think, for people who are watching is,
“Should that money be deployed to more terrestrial, philanthropic goals
with a larger impact?” But for Bezos, this is his dream. He gave his high
school valedictorian speech about opening up the economy in space. This is what
he’s going to do. So yes, in his remaining time on this planet, I expect him to
be fully into Blue Origin and funding this goal. And look, he basically just
put his own life on the line to take the maiden crew voyage of the suborbital
rocket, New Shepherd. So I think he’s fully in it.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and
hosts a weekly podcast, “Political
Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Brad Stone is the senior executive
editor for global technology at Bloomberg News, as well as a writer for
Bloomberg Businessweek.

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