There are fewer visionaries in the technology industry than the mythos of Silicon Valley would have one believe. But Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, and now, the owner of the Washington Post, is one of them. His purchase of the Post—and assorted other, smaller properties with it—for two hundred and fifty million dollars in cash was a shock to many. The traditional book-publishing industry sees his company as its enemy, and just last year, he said in an interview, “There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years.” But buying one of the most venerable institutions of journalism in this country is not so astounding when set against the grander backdrop of Jeff Bezos’s ambitions.
There’s an unfortunate ritual for technology companies today: a new product launches with a press conference in which the founder/visionary-in-chief stands at the front of a dark stage, his back to a room-sized PowerPoint presentation and his face to a crowd of journalists and onlookers. He explains his vision and holds aloft the Newest Coming of the company’s flagship product. This ceremony, made popular by Apple—and more specifically Steve Jobs—only works if the person onstage can hold the rapt attention of his or her audience. And no one else in the technology industry has come closer to Jobs than Bezos. At last year’s Kindle announcement, Bezos seemed like he was constantly on the brink of spontaneously combusting, as though the molecules of his body were vibrating at a slightly faster speed than most people’s. This is partly a matter of charisma, but it is mostly, it seems, a consequence of the intensity of his belief.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, when he was thirty, and initially ran it out of his garage as an online bookstore in Bellevue, Washington. It is now the world’s largest online retailer, and it has radically altered everything from the publishing industry, with Kindle, to cloud computing, with Amazon Web Services. (A.W.S. is so popular for providing bandwidth to tech companies that outages can cripple a staggering number of Web sites and services; Amazon is now building cloud infrastructure for the government.) Amazon has acquired an assortment of well-known Web companies, including the Internet Movie Database, Box Office Mojo, Woot, Zappos, Audible, and GoodReads. Amazon is also, perhaps most importantly, one of the most beloved companies in technology. Its mission statement: “We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators.” (Not included: traditional book publishers, whom he considers to be mere middlemen.) It has so assiduously declined to maximize profits in deference to making its core customers happy that Slate’s Matthew Yglesias once described it as “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” even if this is in order to, as Wall Street hopes, one day become a monopoly, and having completely destroyed all potential competitors, profit immensely. (It also has benefited Bezos, of course, who is now among the twenty richest people in the world.)
But Amazon already only consumes a portion of Bezos’s attention. In 2000, he founded Blue Origin, a private aerospace company that is working on “technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability”—things like reusable spacecraft. Bezos has invested at least a hundred and seventy-five million dollars of his own money into the company, according to Bloomberg. Bezos has also invested forty-two million dollars into the construction of a clock designed to run for ten thousand years. And through his private investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, he funded the recovery of the Apollo 11’s F-1 rocket engines, which had been sitting under fourteen thousand feet of ocean water for decades, and invested in a number of startups and technology companies, including AirBnB, Makerbot, Twitter, and Uber. (The firm recently invested five million dollars in Henry Blodget’s Business Insider Web publication.)
There are, of course, concerns with this transaction. Amazon could stand to gain from its C.E.O. owning one of the powerful and vocal institutions in Washington, D.C., given the company’s entanglements with legislation regarding the collection of sales tax, for instance, and the recent antitrust case pursued against its rival in the e-book business, Apple, by the Department of Justice. And it would do well for one of the nation’s most respected papers to ignore or play down reports in the past alleging brutal work conditions at Amazon’s warehouses, like mandatory overtime, unsustainable productivity rates for many workers, and warehouse temperatures that reach a hundred degrees in the summer, where, rather than install air conditioning, paramedics stood by to treat fainting workers. And a man with no direct experience in journalism now owns one of the most important brands in journalism, a legendary voice: the newspaper of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and Edward Snowden’s N.S.A. revelations.
But the fairest way to look at the deal is to see it as something done by a man who is attempting to completely change the way people and corporations distribute, purchase, and consume practically everything—and who wants to send humans into space en masse. Bezos is a proponent of patience, if nothing else: Amazon.com, launched in 1995, did not make a profit until the last quarter of 2001; in some quarters it still loses money. Blue Origin suffered a high-profile failure of a spacecraft in 2011; the site notes that its work “is a long-term effort, which we’re pursuing incrementally, step by step.” It might as well be talking about rebuilding the Washington Post, which has radically downsized over the last several years. Bezos is a man, after all, who’s trying to build a clock that will run for ten millennia which is buried inside of a remote mountain in Texas, simply because he desired the existence of “an icon for long-term thinking.”
Photograph by David McNew/Getty.
