With an estimated net worth of roughly $190 billion, Amazon founder and former
CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world by a significant margin. However,
Bezos hasn't earned all that money by being a nice guy. Here's the dark truth about Jeff Bezos.
When people discuss Jeff Bezos, a recurring theme seems to be his insistence on holding
all the strings he can reach. Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July 2021,
but his former employees and critics have had things to say about his tenure.
In an interview with CBS News, Noel Tichy from the University of Michigan described Bezos as a,
quote, "control freak" and Amazon as a "one-man show." Business Insider tells
the story of former Amazon engineer Steve Yegge, who went even further by saying:
"[Jeff Bezos made] ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies."
Bezos seems to be fairly unapologetic about this and was known to tell his employees that
they should pay him to work at Amazon. Yegge did admit that Bezos' tendency to micromanage
was overshadowed by the fact that he's extremely smart and often far ahead of his time. However,
that didn't make things any easier for his employees. In 2002, the CEO suddenly demanded
that all his engineering teams must rebuild their systems from the ground up to build Amazon into a
platform where every system was compatible and that outside developers could easily access. He
also promised to fire every single person who couldn't pull off this massive undertaking.
To say Jeff Bezos was not the world's most softly-spoken boss is like saying that the
lemon is not the sweetest fruit. In his book, The Everything Store, author Brad
Stone describes Bezos' tendency to go ballistic when an employee didn't meet his standards.
The billionaire had an array of hyperbolic and harsh insults he spewed at the unfortunate
targets of his ire with such anger that a blood vessel bulged on his head.
Some of these attacks were more or less understandable, such as when someone
tried to blatantly bluff their way through a situation or attempted to take credit for
someone else's work. However, an Amazon employee could get chewed out for any number of reasons,
including internal politics, or simply not having all the right answers straight away.
For a man who The Atlantic estimates would have to spend $28 million a day in 2018 just
to avoid getting richer, Jeff Bezos appears to have a strange relationship with charity.
BGR describes how he took to Twitter in 2017 to ask people what he should do to be
a philanthropist. Then, in a 2018 interview with Mathias Döphner, he states that the
only way he can see to use his wealth is to spend it on his space company, Blue Origin.
Out of the four richest Americans, which include Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg,
AOL says Bezos is the most elusive about charity, despite being Number 1. He's also
the only one of the four who hasn't signed the Giving Pledge — the commitment many of
the world's wealthiest people make to use the majority of their resources for good causes.
In all fairness, Bezos has made some charitable donations over the years.
In 2020, CBS News reports he launched the Bezos Earth Fund to help fight climate change with
a $10 billion gift and gave $100 million to the Feeding America COVID-19 Response Fund.
In 2018, he started the Day One Fund, which aims to devote $2 billion to address homelessness and
education issues. However, Vox points out that the initiative is uncharacteristically
vague and potentially ineffective for a Bezos effort, and Recode even wondered whether the
world's richest person would be so generous if he wasn't under such intense scrutiny.
Even if the Day One Fund is ultimately successful in whatever its mission is,
it's still peanuts compared to the $41.3 billion that the significantly less wealthy
Bill Gates gave in charitable donations between 2000 and 2016.
Few people like paying taxes, but even fewer can compare to Jeff Bezos in how
frankly he speaks about his hard work to dodge them. According to Fortune, Bezos
famously decided to found Amazon in Washington state instead of the hot tech hub of California
and was perfectly happy to admit that he did it to dodge California's sales taxes.
At one point, Bezos even considered planting Amazon on a Native American
reservation in California, where it would have been exempt from state sales tax.
This was just the beginning of Amazon's natural aversion to tax-paying. For the next 20 years,
the company carefully avoided sales taxes in the majority of other states, too.
This gave it a price advantage over traditional book retailers
and helped it to establish a strong foothold in e-commerce.
As The Atlantic points out, Amazon's attitude toward taxes hasn't exactly changed through the
years. As a massive economic player, it's able to parlay governments and states for billions
and billions of tax deductions. In 2017, the company made $5.6 billion in pure profit, and in
2018 CNBC reported a profit of $11 billion — yet Amazon paid no federal income taxes whatsoever.
As a major shareholder, this policy directly benefited Bezos — who naturally commanded
a fairly small salary, meaning nearly all of his income was subject to capital gains taxes,
which maxed out at just 20% instead of the 37% top rate on regular income.
In late 2017, Amazon announced that it wanted to pick a location for its new "HQ2" headquarters and
began graciously accepting offers from cities all over the USA. Many of the offers were ridiculously
generous, basically a competition to see who could give away enough freebies to lure Amazon in.
MacLean's reported that many jumped at the chance to get the corporate juggernaut in their backyard.
Chicago offered to direct $1.32 billion of the income taxes paid by Amazon workers back to the
company itself. Newark's bid included over $7 billion in assorted tax benefits. Maryland's
package of incentives and tax exemptions totaled $8.5 billion, and they even named their program
"Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland's Economy" just to shoehorn in the acronym PRIME.
New York and Virginia won the bidding war, but according to In These Times,
everyone involved actually lost, saying that neither location was
likely to bring the promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment in the region.
In fact, in 2019, Amazon halted their New York plans due to local opposition.
"All we ask is they be a good neighbor and be part of the community, and clearly
they weren't ready to do that."
And, while plans are still underway in Virginia,
Amazon has estimated only around 25,000 new jobs over the next decade for the new headquarters.
When Amazon was starting out, many small publishers welcomed this new way of distribution
with open arms. Unfortunately, they didn't quite realize what they were signing up for.
The Everything Store reveals that Jeff Bezos doesn't think too highly of the
publishing business and views the industry as a helpless animal just waiting for a predator.
When the smaller publishers started becoming more and more dependent on Amazon for sales,
the company suddenly started playing hardball, demanding more favorable contract
terms in ways that The Everything Store calls straight-up sadistic.
This treatment was courtesy of the former CEO himself, as Bezos had ordered his employees to:
"[A]pproach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle."
As a result of this mandate, some Amazon executives took such sadistic pleasure in abusing
publishers that the company's lawyers started feeling a little worried about the situation.
Eventually, they stepped in and demanded that Amazon rename its publisher-abusing business
program from the Gazelle Project to the more corporate-friendly Small Publishers Negotiation
Program. When your lawyers have to calm you down, you know you've maybe gone too far.
To shape Amazon according to his vision, Jeff Bezos created the Leadership Principles.
Among other things, these 14 rules required workers to obsess
over customers, accomplish more with less, and make speedy decisions while maintaining,
quote, "relentlessly high standards." If that sounds unrealistic, many employees have agreed.
The New York Times describes a workers toiled over projects without sleeping for four days in a row,
paid freelancers in India to help them keep up with data entry, and spent vacations
at Starbucks using the free Wi-Fi to get work done. This sort of ruthless corporate
culture can lead to health issues, which the company has been less than sympathetic about.
Amazon has reportedly cast aside workers who can't perform to the company's borderline
impossible expectations, regardless of the reason behind their so-called "incompetence."
Even workers who have suffered cancer, miscarriages, or other life-altering
personal crises can be evaluated unfairly or, quote, "managed out."
The company even gave an insanely hard time to the people who could actually cope with the pressure.
Ex-employee Chris Brucia tells a story about a particularly punishing performance review in 2012.
His boss eviscerated him with a 30-minute lecture on all his faults and every goal he
had failed to meet. Just when Brucia was certain his Amazon career was at an end,
his boss hugged him and informed him that he was, in fact, being promoted.
Jeff Bezos was a mighty CEO and is a noted tech industry power player,
but as Market Watch describes, there's also a whole lot about him that's ripe for comparison
with a comic book supervillain. Apart from having the same hairstyle as Lex Luthor,
he has money to burn and the "control of a globally influential media institution."
"Uh, well, these are, these are, you know, sticky balls."
"Obviously, they work. Yeah, that's great. That's very impressive."
His penchant for developing a fleet for space exploration is another tick on the checklist,
as is one of his stranger vanity projects — a 500-foot-tall, thermally powered
"10,000-year clock" that he's embedding in a mountain for reasons that remain his own.
Bezos even has the melodramatic laugh to go with the classic villain image.
As Inc. points out, the billionaire is known for his loud, honking laughter.
"You generally hear him before you see him."
On January 9, 2019, Jeff Bezos announced on Twitter that he
and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, were divorcing.
According to USA Today, an extramarital affair may have something to do with the divorce,
as multiple tabloids claimed Bezos had developed a relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez.
Some even released private photos and messages in which Bezos was
said to flaunt his strangely robotic sexting skills, allegedly writing:
"I love you, alive girl. [...] I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon."
Bezos' divorce announcement strongly indicated that the separation was amicable and the two exes
will remain friends. In July 2019, a settlement was reached, with MacKenzie receiving $38 billion.
Over the next two years, she donated billions to charities across a variety of sectors — in
stark comparison to her ex-husband's record of charitable giving. In 2021, MacKenzie married
science teacher Dan Jewett. In a statement, Jeff Bezos wished the newlyweds well, saying,
"Dan is such a great guy."
The warehouse is rarely the most luxurious place of employment in any company, but things are
really bad when people are peeing in water bottles and comparing the work environment to prison.
Life in an Amazon warehouse involves both of those things, and many more.
In 2016, author James Bloodworth went undercover in an Amazon warehouse to research for a book and
soon discovered that the job was so hectic that he didn't have enough time to eat or drink properly.
The atmosphere reminded him of prison, and the airport-style security checks and oppressive,
point-based management added to the image.
Some of the employees even peed in bottles and left them on the shelves because the
performance targets were so high that they didn't have time to take a bathroom break.
While Amazon denied many of Bloodworth's claims and has since stopped using the
employment agency that hired him due to its questionable policies,
other warehouse workers have repeated the writer's claims. According to multiple reports by Wired,
Business Insider, the Guardian, The New York Times, and Newsweek,
warehouse employees still urinate in bottles and even trash cans due to time constraints.
"Yeah, I found an empty Coca-Cola bottle with, with urine in it on the shelf."
The workers also say that many of the problems Bloodworth reported persist.
The targets are too high, surveillance is constant, the pay is inadequate,
and workplace injuries are depressingly common.
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