The man who can’t stop getting richer

Jeff Bezos is worth over $130 billion (£104 bn). This makes him the wealthiest person of all time.

He owns Whole Foods, Blue Origin, Twitch, Audible, and the Washington Post.

He owns the cloud computing and online storage that supports Netflix, the CIA, and the NHS.

Most crucially, he founded and still runs Amazon.com, the online shopping giant that he once dubbed “the everything store”.

And despite the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of the economy, 2020 has so far been yet another prosperous year for Jeff Bezos.

The entrepreneur, whose favourite insult is: “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” increased his personal wealth by well over $20 billion (£16 bn), while 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment.

In a world of social distancing and working-from-home, the increased reliance on web-based services and deliveries will only increase both Amazon’s and Bezos’s own financial dominance.

Next week, a new book about Bezos is published titled, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Companies Are Learning from It.

It gives away some of the secrets of his success. Back in the late 90s, it was just an online book store, now it is a trillion dollar company.

In the headquarters, executives can recite the company policies by heart and follow quirky corporate jargon like the “two pizza rule”.

But the rank and file employees working in massive warehouses, filled with the distinctive beige boxes, face a different reality, constantly being monitored and timed. If they work too slowly, they get fired. As one former employee said, “If you’re not constantly moving, you’re probably gone.”

There is also a business cost to Amazon’s dominance. As the writer Charles Duhigg puts it, “Amazon’s obsession with expansion made it the corporate equivalent of a coloniser, ruthlessly invading new industries and subjugating many smaller companies along the way.”

On a more technical front, Amazon has pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to guess what customers want before they themselves know. For instance, Alexa home-assistant devices will soon book medical appointments for you if they hear you cough.

So, is Jeff Bezos a genius or monster?

Head in the cloud

To many entrepreneurs, he is the pinnacle of business brilliance: an inventor and visionary who has created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth. Bezos keeps making money because he can continually improve his products, while still gauging long-term trends. As he puts it, “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” Other companies just cannot compete.

To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong in an economic system that continually rewards those who already have. Amazon is a notorious tax evader. Its employees work in stressful conditions. It transforms economies, wiping out old jobs too quickly for governments to react.