Jeff Bezos
Co-founder of Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos
rubbed elbows last weekend with Halle Berry, Chris Hemsworth and other
Hollywood celebrities at an after-party for the Golden Globes. In December, he
walked the red carpet, along with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, at a screening of
“The Post” in Washington. On Friday, Mr. Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, made
public their $33 million donation to a nonprofit that provides college
scholarships to so-called Dreamers, young immigrants brought to the United
States illegally as children. In October, he received an award for a donation
to a marriage equality campaign.
Jennifer Cast,
an Amazon executive who solicited the donation from him, said at the event that
they could have donated anonymously to the campaign. “But just as critical as
the money was Jeff’s offer to let us publicly acknowledge their gifts,” she
said.
“By allowing us to take their donation
public,” she added, “the world quickly knew that Jeff Bezos supported marriage
equality.”
As he was
shaping Amazon into one of the world’s most valuable companies, Mr. Bezos
developed a reputation as a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate
titan. He preferred to hunker down in Amazon’s hometown, Seattle, at least
partly because he thought it was better for Amazon’s growing business, largely
avoiding public causes and the black-tie circuit.
But while Mr. Bezos — who at 54 is the
world’s richest person, with a net worth of more than $100 billion — can afford
virtually any luxury, obscurity is no longer among them.
Amazon, now a
behemoth valued at more than $600 billion, has become one of the faces of “big
tech,” along with Apple, Alphabet’s Google and Facebook. These companies are
facing a backlash. Amazon is under the microscope for what critics say is its
corrosive effect on jobs and competition, and Mr. Bezos has become a bête noire
for President Trump, who repeatedly singles out him and Amazon for scorn on
Twitter.
“People are starting to get scared of
Amazon,” said Steve Case, a co-founder of America Online, who recently started
an investment fund focused on start-ups in underserved areas, with Mr. Bezos
among its contributors. “If Jeff continues to hang out in Seattle, he’s going
to get a lot more incoming. Even for just defense reasons, he has to now play
offense.”
Mr. Bezos’
portfolio of other ventures has thrust him farther into the spotlight. In
October 2013, he bought The Washington Post for $250 million, jump-starting a
renaissance of the paper. In 2016, Mr. Bezos bought a $23 million home in
Washington, one of the city’s most expensive, which is undergoing extensive
renovations to make it a suitable party spot for the city’s political class.
Nearby neighbors include former President Barack Obama and his family, and Mr.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Bezos’ space start-up, Blue Origin, is
also making its efforts more public, giving him another stage. The company is
trying to rescue Earth by helping to move pollution-belching heavy industries
off the planet.
He’s getting
thanked at the Golden Globes and targeted by presidential tweet tantrums — not
even Steve Jobs had that kind of pop-culture currency,” said Margaret O’Mara, a
professor of history at the University of Washington, who curated a museum
exhibit in Seattle endowed by Mr. Bezos.
In a statement,
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, said, “Jeff loves what he is doing, at
Amazon, Blue Origin and The Washington Post, and he enjoys sharing his
enthusiasm in public as he works with the teams to build and invent.” But
interviews with more than 30 people who know Mr. Bezos, most of whom declined
to be identified to protect their relationships with him, revealed his
awareness of the growing opposition to Amazon and his growing comfort with
being in the public eye.
Mr. Bezos, they said, ‘’accepts the
probability of greater government scrutiny of Amazon. The chief executive has
advised Amazon executives to conduct themselves so that they can pass any legal
or regulatory test.’’
The investor
Warren E. Buffett, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s, said the cautionary
tale of Microsoft, which faced a landmark antitrust case by the government that
decade, must loom in Mr. Bezos’ mind. Microsoft, by far the most dominant
technology company at the time, lost its footing after the case, opening an
unexpected opportunity for competitors.
“You’re going to get a lot of scrutiny if you’re disrupting other
people’s livelihoods,” Mr. Buffett said.
Some of the people who know Mr. Bezos said his new public face was for
business expediency. Others believe it is a result of personal growth.
But they all said it was clear that Mr.
Bezos and Amazon were trying to go beyond his tech persona to show the world
his other sides.
Mr. Bezos has
always been happy to play the role of Amazon’s chief pitchman, especially when
he perceives some benefit to Amazon customers from doing so, people who have worked
with him said. He submits to interviews and speaks at events when, for
instance, a new company product like the Kindle electronic reader or Echo
speaker needs to be explained to the world.
But for nearly two decades, he was adamant
that the company should largely stay out of the political limelight and not
make a stir in local communities. It also had a bare-bones lobbying operation.
Even as he was named Time magazine’s person
of the year in 1999, he tried to avoid politics. He was even reluctant to do
photo opportunities with politicians, standard fare for executives, one
longtime former employee said.
A hedge fund
executive in New York who caught the internet bug early, Mr. Bezos piled into a
vehicle with his wife in 1994 with the intention of finding a place to start a
business selling books on the internet. He founded Amazon later that year in
Seattle, in part because of the growing pool of technical talent Microsoft had
brought to the area.
But putting his start-up in Washington also
meant Amazon would not have to collect sales tax in the country’s most populous
states, like California, Texas and New York. Retailers typically have an
obligation to collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence.
For a time, for
the same reason, the company would not publicly discuss where most of its
warehouses were. And Amazon employees in Seattle who planned to travel out of
state for work had to submit itineraries for review to avoid triggering
unwanted sales tax liabilities.
Those efforts would, in turn, give his
fledgling company a further price advantage against established physical
retailers like Barnes & Noble.
It also meant that, despite its growing
legions of customers, Amazon remained almost invisible in politics.
By the end of
2012, the company had swelled to more than 88,000 employees and over $61
billion in annual sales, creating huge businesses like its Prime membership
service and Amazon Web Services along the way. Yet that year the company was
criticized by leaders in Seattle and the news media for being disengaged from
civic life compared with stalwarts like Boeing and Starbucks.
I’m not aware of what Amazon does in the
community,” Sally Jewell, the chief executive of the retailer R.E.I. at the
time, said in The Seattle Times in 2012. “It’s not a name that comes up often
in the nonprofit organizations I’m involved with.”
With investors, Mr. Bezos gave just enough of
a peek at Amazon’s business to win their confidence while saying as little as
possible to keep competitors guessing. To this day, Amazon will not
disclose exactly how many Kindles, Echoes and other devices it has sold, and
for years it refused to reveal financial details about Amazon Web Services, its
highly profitable cloud computing business.
Despite the paucity of details, investors
have sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last decade, dazzled by
its growth.
A
Growing Spotlight
A turning point
came for Mr. Bezos around 2011 when Amazon faced a public showdown with state
governments.
At the time, legislators began hounding
internet retailers like Amazon to collect sales tax. In California, Amazon
initially campaigned to overturn a new law imposing an internet sales tax. But
Mr. Bezos backed off after it became clear that Amazon’s image could be
tarnished, a former employee involved in the matter said.
Instead, Amazon began to make peace. In
2011, it signed an agreement with California to collect sales tax in the state,
reaching numerous similar agreements around the same time.
As part of those state deals, Amazon began
building warehouses across the country, which allowed Amazon to deliver orders
more quickly and let local politicians trumpet the arrival of thousands of
jobs.
Suddenly, a company that once refused to confirm how many employees it
had at its Seattle headquarters could not stop talking about how many jobs it
was creating. It now has 542,000 employees.
As Mr. Bezos and the company talked about
creating jobs, though, he and Amazon faced a counternarrative from critics that
the company was really a job-killing bully.
English answer:
1.
The article use simple past
Tense
Poof:
Suddenly, a company that once refused to confirm how many employees it had at its
Seattle headquarters could not stop talking about how many jobs it was
creating. It now has 542,000 employees.
2.
Restate one sentence in the article into gerund / to + infinitive
Infinitive: “Mr.
Bezos gave just enough of a peek at Amazon’s business to win their confidence “ while saying as little as possible to keep competitors guessing.”
Gerund: ‘’Mr. Bezos gave just enough of a peek at
Amazon’s business to win their confidence while to say as little as possible to keep competitors
guessing.’’
3.
Show a use of personal pronouns or possessive pronouns or reflexive
pronouns in the article.
“You’re going to get a lot of scrutiny if you’re disrupting other
people’s livelihoods,” Mr.
Buffett said. Some of the people who know Mr. Bezos
said his new public face was for business expediency. Others believe it is a
result of personal growth. But they all said it was clear that Mr. Bezos and
Amazon were trying to go beyond his tech persona to show the world his other
sides.
