7◼ REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek February 8, 2021CHRIS
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● JeffBezos’surpriseresignation
astheCEOofAmazonseems
somehownaturalandeveninevitable● ByBradStone
JeffBezoshasa formulationaboutone-waydoorsandtwo-way
doors—decisions that are irreversible and permanent and
those that can always be unwound. Stepping through what’s
almost certainly a one-way door on Feb. 2, Bezos said he will
resign as chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. and
become executive chairman later this year. He’ll hand day-
to-day control to Andy Jassy, the longtime head of Amazon
Web Services, a swiftly growing division that’s almost sin-
gle-handedly changed the way companies buy the technol-
ogy that powers their businesses.
With that comes at least a partial end to one of the most
epic runs in business history. Yet Bezos’ move feels, in many
ways, natural and even inevitable. Over the past 25 years
the Amazon founder, now 57, led the company through per-
haps the most fertile period of any American business ever.
Amazon began as just an idea at the Wall Street hedge fund
D. E. Shaw & Co., where Bezos was a vice president; it was
an online bookseller and era-defining dot-com stock during
the late 1990s. Bezos then rescued the company from the
internet bust by inventing and guiding creations such as
Kindle, Amazon Prime, and AWS. Along the way, he minted
an idiosyncratic corporate culture, where employees almost
religiously adhere to 14 leadership principles (“invent and
simplify,” “customer obsession,” etc.) and constantly write
belabored six-page documents that, at the start of meetings,
are read by all attendees in almost sacred silence.
While that culture has drawn criticism for being difficult,
even punishing, particularly for employees seeking work-life
balance, it’s also been unmistakably effective: Over the past
decade, Bezos has piloted Amazon to a $1.7 trillion market
capitalization, where it occupies the same rarefied 13-figure
air as Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.
But Bezos’ decision to step down also reflects an uncom-
fortable reality for one of the wealthiest people in the world:
The walls of his highly compartmentalized empire have been
crumbling for some time. It’s becoming increasingly difficult
to be Jeff Bezos (at least by his own standards). He presides
over a collection of properties that spans not only Amazon
but also the Washington Post, several philanthropies, and a
space company, Blue Origin LLC, that lags far behind its chief
rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Just consider the ways the various Bezos assets have col-
lided over the past few years. His ownership of the Post con-
sistently angered the last U.S. president and probably cost
Amazon the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing
contract, which the Trump-controlled Defense Departmentawarded to Microsoft. When he traveled to India in early
2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declined to meet with
him, and a senior official criticized the Post’s coverage of
the country.
Union organizers perpetually protest Amazon’s treatment
ofitsblue-collarworkforceandperiodicallyshowupinfrontof
Bezos’homes—once,withgallinglypoorjudgment,theyeven
wheeledouta guillotine.Bezos,nowthesecond-wealthiest
person in the world, is an obvious target for this kind of frus-
tration, but Amazon’s relationship with its 1 million blue-collar
workers around the world makes the situation more fraught.
Thecompanyhasembracedandextendedtheuseofout-
sidecontractorsforsomeofitsleastglamorouswork,suchas
drivingpackage-deliverytrucksandholiday-surge staffing at
warehouses. Economists have blamed this so-called fissured
workplace for increasing inequality and contributing to unsafe
working environments. Amazon employees in an Alabama ful-
fillment center are set to vote this winter on whether to union-
ize and try to curb such practices.
Further complicating Bezos World are the environmen-
tal impacts of Prime and the online shopping habits Amazon
has enabled in millions of users. In 2019, Bezos created the
Climate Pledge and vowed the company will get to net carbon
neutral across its businesses by 2040. Last year he unveiled a
personal philanthropy, the Bezos Earth Fund, with plans to
give out $10 billion to fight climate change. Those are laud-
ablegoals,buttheyalsoconflictdirectlywithAmazonasit
currentlyexists:Thecompanyis growing38%a yearandsup-
portingthatexpansionwithanarmadaofpollution-spewing
trucks,cargoairplanes,andenergy-intensive AWS data cen-
ters. Last year, Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, got
a taste of how difficult that balancing act will be. When they
started canvassing climate philanthropies to begin making
the initial grants from the Bezos Earth Fund, at least some of
the organizations, skeptical of Amazon’s climate record and
its relationship with its front-line workers, were hesitant to
accept Bezos’ largesse.
Many of the criticisms levied against Bezos and his empire
are reasonable and can be navigated. But the most con-
strained resource in his web of conflicting business holdings
is his own time, and that can’t be easily managed. He used
to spend part of Wednesdays and weekends at Blue Origin,
based just south of Seattle. But that may no longer be enough.
Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX but so far has
little to show for it, despite Bezos funding the company by
selling $1 billion of his Amazon stock every year. In January,
Blue Origin launched a successful test flight of New Shepard,
a rocket that will carry paying tourists to the edge of subor-
bital space. It hopes to send actual people on a mission this
summer, according to a person with knowledge of the com-
pany’s plans who asked not to be identified.
The Blue Origin website proclaims, “We are not in a race,
and there will be many players in this human endeavor to go
to space.” But, of course, practically everyone in the space
industry, including those at SpaceX and even at Blue Origin,