- Your most prominent critic at the moment
is the president of the United States.
People are even saying that he may be willing
to prepare initiatives to break up Amazon
because it's too big, it's too successful,
it's too dominant in too many sectors,
or for varied other reasons.
First of all, is this scenario of a break up something
that you take seriously, or you think it's just a fantasy?
- For me, again this is one those things where
you know, I focus on, and ask our teams
to focus on what we can control.
And, I expect, whether it's the current US administration
or any other government agency anywhere in the world,
Amazon is now a large corporation,
and I expect us to be scrutinized.
We should be scrutinized.
I think all large institutions should be scrutinized
and examined.
It's reasonable.
And, what's, you know, one thing to note about us
is that we have, we have gotten big in absolute terms
only very recently, so we've always been growing fast
in percentage terms, but in 2010, just eight years ago,
we had 30,000 employees.
So, in the last eight years we've gone from 30,000 employees
to 560,000 employees.
So for us, you know, in my mind, I'm still delivering
the packages to the post office myself.
You see what I'm saying?
I still have all the memories of, you know,
hoping one day we could afford a forklift.
And, obviously that's, my intellectual brain knows
that's just not the case anymore.
We have 560,000 employees all over the world
and I know we should be scrutinized,
and I think it's true, a big government institution
should be scrutinized, a big non profit institution
should be scrutinized, big universities should
be scrutinized, it just makes sense.
And that, by the way, is why the work
that The Washington Post and other great newspapers
around the world do is so important,
because they are often the ones doing
that initial scrutiny even before the government agencies do
- But in a way the general sentiment towards
the big, innovative tech companies has changed.
I mean, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon,
they used to be seen as the nice guys in T shirts
that are saving the world, and now they are
sometimes portrayed as the kind of evil of the world.
And the debate about the big four or the big five,
if The Economist is suggesting a split up
other powerful people like George Soros
are giving speeches in Davos,
the EU Commission is taking pretty tough positions here.
Do you think that there is a change
in mindset in the society?
And what should the big tech companies,
what should Amazon learn from that or do with that?
- I think, I do sense, I mean, I think again,
I think it's a natural instinct,
I think we humans, especially in the Western world
and especially inside democracies,
are wired to be skeptical and mindful of large institutions
of any kind, we're skeptical, I'm sure,
we're skeptical of our government
always in the United States, state governments,
local governments, I assume it's similar in Germany.
It's healthy, because they're big, powerful institutions.
You know, the police, the military, whatever it is,
it doesn't mean that you don't trust them
or that they're bad or evil or anything like that,
they're just, they have a lot of power and control
and so you want to inspect them.
Maybe that's a better word.
You kinda wanna always be inspecting them.
And I think if you look at the big tech companies,
they have gotten large enough that they need,
they're going to be inspected.
And by the way, it's not personal.
I think where some of the, where you can go astray on this
if you're the founder of a company,
one of these big tech companies
or any other big institution, if you go astray on this,
you might start to take it personally,
like what why are you inspecting me?
And I wish that people would just say yes, it's fine.