Transcript: Dana Mattioli on Amazon’s Everything War
The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Dana Mattioli on Amazon’s Everything War, is below.
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This is Masters in business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio
Barry Ritholtz: This weekend on the podcast, I have another extra special guest. Dana Manoli is the Amazon reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In addition to covering Amazon, she is an award-winning reporter who has deep roots in both m and a and retail. Her new book is really quite fascinating. The Everything War, Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power just came out a few months ago. I thought this was a really interesting book. I I read a lot of stuff for interviews and this is a book that I would’ve just plowed through regardless. It, it, it was really fascinating. And, you know, a lot of the things you, you suspect about Amazon, you think about, you know, how they flex their corporate muscles.
You, you have like a loose idea. Hey, they really seem to be the 800 pound gorilla. I had no idea, as I’m reading the book, I’m just genuinely shocked. And by the way, it’s deeply investigated and researched. She did hundreds of interviews with, with former employees and, and executives and partners and cl like just everybody who was affiliated with this. And these are not nice people. These are ethically compromised executives who are just hell bent on increasing profits by any means necessary. And she paints a not very pretty picture of, of the company. Its culture, its tactics. Like I thought I knew Amazon, and it turns out I, I really didn’t know Amazon. Fascinating book and a really fascinating conversation that I think you’ll enjoy. With no further ado my discussion with the Wall Street Journals. Dana Oli, welcome to Bloomberg.
Dana Mattioli: Thanks For having me.
Barry Ritholtz: We’ve been trying to get this scheduled for quite some time. We’ve been ships in the night and I’m glad we finally did this. Before we get into the book, I just have to go over your background, which is really fascinating. You started the Journal in 2006. Tell us a little bit about how you got there. Oh,
Dana Mattioli: I say I snuck through the back door. I started a week after graduating from college. Amazing. As a journalism major and an English lit major. I had some freelance clips while I was in college. I, I would go and take my articles that I wrote for class and, and sell them to the local newspapers in Washington DC Right. Sometimes just give them away to get a byline. And that’s sort of how I got hired at the journal and just really learned as a grunt at that point. And, you know, rose up the ranks.
Barry Ritholtz: It’s kind of fascinating that you’re the Amazon reporter now ’cause you began covering retail companies like JC Penney’s. I don’t know if we’d call Kodak retail or they had a retail retail arm. Tell us a little bit about some of the companies you covered and some of the front page scoops you got.
Dana Mattioli: Yeah, so for a while I was the retail reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I loved that job. I basically covered 30 different publicly traded retailers from Gap to Macy’s to Nordstrom, and got to know a lot of those CEOs very well. People like Mickey Drexler over at J Crew. Sure. Right. Like legends. And that was a really good education for me actually in writing this book because I saw firsthand through their lens of how they had to react to a young Jeff Bezos and how that was decimating their businesses.
Barry Ritholtz: Right. You start in ’06 at that point, Amazon is what a decade old just about. Yeah. And had already begun to damage traditional retailers. You go from retail to doing large m and a deals. You covered the Pfizer Allergen deal and a bunch of other m and a. Tell us how you went from retail to mergers and acquisitions. Yeah,
Dana Mattioli: There was a stop before that actually. I covered Kodak, like you said. That was my first corporate gig and then retail. And then I did, I was the m and a reporter with another reporter named Dana Sim Luca, who’s a good friend of mine. And our whole job was to break what companies were buying other companies. And it was a really exciting job. You’d get these giant tips, a hundred billion dollar deals, and you put the headlines down and you’d see the stock prices just go through the roof. Right. It was like this kind of adrenaline rush of a beat. So I did that for six years, which is a very long time to cover that beat because it’s fairly all on, you know, you work every Sunday ’cause deals get announced on Monday. But also a a through line on that beat was the beginning of that beat. When I started in 2013. The retail companies, the consumer companies were worried about Amazon. By the time I left that beat in 2019, every single corporate boardroom I spoke to every CEO, every banker in industrials, healthcare, every industry was worried about Amazon.
Barry Ritholtz: Huh. And, and just to, to wrap up the M&A, you win another Loeb award in 2016 covering the Dow DuPont merger. That was a giant merger. Tell us a little bit about that story.
Dana Mattioli: That was, you know, that this was a time when there were a lot of, there was a lot of industrial m and a, a lot of these corporate giants that, you know, had been esteemed companies were hitting a rough patch. And we started to see a lot of deals in the chemicals space and the industrial space. I broke that with my colleagues, Dana and Luca and Dave Benoit. And it, that was one of the biggest years for m and a that I was on the beat.
Barry Ritholtz: So retail M&A, how do you end up, not just back in the online retail space with Amazon, but making that your sole beat? How did you become Amazon only as a reporter?
Dana Mattioli: So after six years on the m and a beat, you know, writing probably hundreds of articles, it’s, it’s very competitive beat, compete with Bloomberg pretty fiercely. It was time for me to take a step back from that type of reporting. You get fairly burnt out.
Barry Ritholtz: It’s a grind,
Dana Mattioli: Right? It’s, it’s a grind. You know, I was reporting stories out from my friend’s weddings, from christenings, from family birthday parties. You’re never off. So I wanted to take a step back and, and do a bigger like investigatory beat. And the only thing that really excited me at the time was Amazon. I’d seen them be this major player on the retail beat on the m and a beat. I saw stupid m and a happening because of Amazon. I remember I broke this deal when CVS was buying Aetna. This is the A bet the farm sort of m and a deal. Yeah. $69 billion were CVS. This pharmacy was buying an insurance company. And I learned that the CEO of of CVS was terrified of Amazon. Every board meeting he had with his board, they had Amazon proofing plans put in place. And I started seeing that in other boardrooms too, that these dumb deals were happening. ’cause people were trying to Amazon proof their businesses. And I started to think about how, how little people knew about how Amazon always seemed to win, how they seemed to have their finger on the scale in a lot of ways. So I pitched this investigatory Amazon beat to my bosses at the Wall Street Journal and they, they were into it. They said, if you think you could get inside this black box, then do it.
Barry Ritholtz: What, what year was that?
Dana Mattioli: That was 2019.
Barry Ritholtz: Alright. So by then, I’m trying to remember how big Amazon had become. I mean they obviously blew up after the pandemic, but I wanna say Scott Galloway’s book, the Four had already come out. Brad Stone’s book, the Everything Store. Yep. I don’t know if that had come out yet. That came out I wanna say maybe 2015.
Dana Mattioli: And both of those books sold very well and drew a lot of attention. Amazon, it doesn’t sound like it was a tough argument to get the editors of the Wall Street General to say, Hey, these guys are a behemoth. We need a dedicated person covering just this one company. And they were, they were excited that I’ve raised my hand. I had, I had a, you know, a history of being very scoopy, getting inside companies, getting people
And, and you know, Amazon’s such a big company, you know, they’re $2 trillion today and they’re kind of like a giant, they not kind of, they’re giant conglomerate. They’re like 15 different publicly traded companies in one company. Right. So I, I had, I wanted to do this in a way that I picked my spots. If you just cover Amazon News day in, day out, you could just write wire stories all day. Right. There’s a million stories about them. So I wanted to be deliberate and investigate them.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk a little bit about that deliberate investigation. The book covers Amazon’s quest to own the world and remake corporate power. What does that mean?
Dana Mattioli: Well, Amazon, you know, they started as this against all odds grudge startup. Right. But what we’ve seen in more recent years is that they’ve become the number one or two player by size in about eight different industries. You know, from retail, which we already know. 40% of everything bought online in the US is Amazon to cloud computing. Where they are the biggest cloud computing company in the world. Exactly. In the US they deliver more parcels than UPS or FedEx. And it goes on and on and on.
Barry Ritholtz: that again. They deliver more parcels than UPS or FedEx?
Dana Mattioli: Yes. They’re the number one parcel deliverer. And guess what? It’s, they’re only their own product. They’re not even delivering it really for other people. That’s just Amazon goods. Wow. They, they’ve taken over industry after industry and that’s forced bankruptcies. It’s forced lack of innovation. And beyond that, you know, my book gets into how they have this pattern of lying, cheating, copying their way to the top and using their leverage in all these different industries to crush competition.
Barry Ritholtz: Oh. We’re gonna get into the details of that for sure. I just want to go through the eight areas where they’re number one or two. So online retail, cloud computing, package delivery. What are, what are the other four or five where they’re dominant?
-Voice assistant devices, Alexa.
-In online advertising. They’re number three actually, which I have a whole chart of this, which
-EBooks.
Barry Ritholtz: And that’s before we get to other gadgets. Yeah. I mean the Kindle, does Barnes and Noble still make the Nook?
Dana Mattioli: Do and it’s, it’s kind of a poultry experience. It’s, I’ll tell you, 90% of my eBooks for this book have been sold on Amazon. Which just tells you, right. Like how much of a dominant,
Barry Ritholtz: I’ll tell you something fascinating that when you Google search your book, the first link that comes up is Amazon not, and that’s true on so much stuff. I mean, on Google, I don’t mean on the Amazon site. Yeah, no, I believe that. But on eight verticals, most of which they are either number one or number two.
Dana Mattioli: And they’re, and they’re keeping, you know, they’re gonna keep growing. They, they’re getting into space with this project Kiper. They’re
Barry Ritholtz: Now that’s separate from Bezos’s Blue Origins company. Exactly. You’re talking about a wholly different pursuit coming from Amazon proper
Dana Mattioli: Within their own company. Yes.
Barry Ritholtz: And, and what do they wanna do in space?
Dana Mattioli: They’re gonna go head to head with Elon Musk’s starlink with this, these satellites, these orbital satellites. And that should launch in the next year. So they’re ever growing. And they have a lot of bandwidth to do that in ways that other publicly traded companies really don’t.
00:11:12 [Speaker Changed] Why, why on earth does Amazon want to be in the satellite business? Out of curiosity, is this related at all to blue origins and, and what Bezos is doing with that?
00:11:25 [Speaker Changed] Well, it’s a question for Bezos. I would say, you know, starlink, which is Elon Musk’s venture is considered one of his crown jewels. Okay. So there’s like definitely an appeal there. The way that Elon has it structured, it does fit into his space exploration company. SpaceX, some people posit that this, should this be part of Blue Origin rather than Amazon. Sure. But as of right now, it is part of Amazon
00:11:46 [Speaker Changed] Is the, I guess the thinking must be, hey, if we have more people with access to the internet,
00:11:51 [Speaker Changed] We’re shopping,
00:11:52 [Speaker Changed] More people will shop online and we will capture 40% of it or whatever their right
00:11:57 [Speaker Changed] RAC market share in that they’ll boost those 200 million prime subscribers could grow exponentially. Right.
00:12:02 [Speaker Changed] How, how do you define Amazon Prime as a vertical? Is it just part of their delivery part? It comes with a lot of other things. Where, where do you put Amazon Prime into this?
00:12:14 [Speaker Changed] I mean, it’s one of the biggest membership programs there is at any company.
00:12:18 [Speaker Changed] It’s amazing, right? People
00:12:19 [Speaker Changed] Pay for the privilege to shop with this company.
00:12:21 [Speaker Changed] Well you theoretically pay for two day delivery.
Although if you’ve been an Amazon user for any length of time, that turns out to be BS. ’cause they do everything they can to dissuade you from next day or two day or same day delivery. Hey, ship on Wednesdays with even fewer boxes. Create less ecological waste. Exactly. Ship next Thursday, here’s a 99% digital coupon. Ooh, that’s great. When I rent a movie, it’ll, I’ll save 99 cents. But obviously it works. ’cause the more they can spread out their shipping, the, my, my experience has been the shipping timeliness has decreased dramatically.
00:13:07 [Speaker Changed] I hear that from a lot of shoppers.
00:13:08 [Speaker Changed] Right? Right. I mean I, so I’ve been an Amazon member since I got a gift certificate from my college roommate. I wanna say it was 98. Wow. 1998. So this still on early member and I, I had a college long before that. But, but early member, like I, I used to just search and click whatever comment came up first and it was always the right thing. I, I ordered lithium batteries with a, like for a key fob on your car. It’s a very specific model number. Wouldn’t that exact model number come up first? So I was, and I went back and I redid it and figured out, oh that’s a sponsored link that has nothing to do with what I requested other than it’s roughly a lithium ion battery. So I went to return it and every now and then Amazon will say, eh, don’t bother.
00:13:57 Just, just keep it right and we’ll credit you ’cause it’s more expensive to send it back than the product is worth. So the search has been terrible. The pages are just feto with advertising. The whole experience is much worse. And then there’s the other two issues. The prices are no longer the lowest. And the interesting thing about the pandemic is when they were frequently out of things, it sent you searching. So I think everybody has a target account, a Walmart account, which may not have been true in 2019 pre pandemic. So the whole experience is much less delightful than it was. I kind of think since Bezos left, the people who are there are just focused on how do we max out profitability and the hell with the user experience, which wasn’t what it felt like under Bezos. Or am I wildly overstating that? Well
00:14:53 [Speaker Changed] There’s a, a large part of my book gets into this toxic culture at Amazon where employees are in this Hunger Games like scenario where they’re competing with their other, you know, employees to keep their jobs. ’cause 6%
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00:15:08 [Speaker Changed] weren’t doing, they actually
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leadership team. Like let’s do this ’cause we have to get rid of the bottom performers. But that has unintended consequences. Sure. It means that everyone at Amazon on the white collar side is driven to work in a way that just benefits their numbers, benefits their bottom lines. Even if it’s not good for you as the customer, even if it means it’s unsafe for the customer. Right. As long as it’s expanding selection and increasing profits. That often is the name of the game
00:15:49 [Speaker Changed] Unsafe for the customer? How is it unsafe for
00:15:51 [Speaker Changed] Customer? Yeah. So I have anecdotes in the book where there are well- meaning people on the child marketplace team that are, that where there’s, they’re selling clothes for children. Right. And there’s a mandate from Bezos to expand selection and get more sellers into amazon.com. ’cause the more sellers you have, the more sales you get, the more sales you get able to, the more sellers come on. Exactly. And they, they make changes to the signup process for sellers to onboard to amazon.com. They want to make it easy as possible. Sign up and you could be selling within a day. Okay. Right. So not really vetting these sellers. So
00:16:24 [Speaker Changed] In other words, Chinese junk with that’s not fireproof, that’s not well
00:16:28 [Speaker Changed] Made. Exactly. So then the Chinese junk comes in within a day. Right. And some of these parents on the team are horrified. There are children’s pajamas that smell like gas
00:16:36 [Speaker Changed] Formaldehyde. Right.
00:16:36 [Speaker Changed] Formaldehyde and gas. Yeah. There are hoodies that, that have strings around the neck, which are a strangulation hazard that are banned from being sold in the US because it’s strangled toddler. There are
00:16:46 [Speaker Changed] All these other products coming in. Listen, if a few kids have to die in order for our profit margin to expand, that’s just a little collateral damage. Who can complain as long as our profits are going up. I mean, you know, it’s a tough world ethic. Toughen up. So they
Gets, so we’re talking about the 6%. Yeah. They get Cut at the end of the year Plus forced ranking. That whole, all of that. Like everything they said they Were doing, they’re doing big time. I have all the documents. Right. GE used to cut the bottom 10%. Yep. Intel did this too. Amazon Is only 6%. And then where did the force ranking come from? Jeff liked that Intel did this. Right. And that’s what he said to his, his
00:16:59 [Speaker Changed] Flag this to the No actually they take it upon themselves to add some of the friction back into the process to sign up. Okay. And their boss yells at them and says, take that off. Really? And they, well we’re trying to protect the consumer. We ostensibly we are a customer obsessed organization, which is what they say. Right? And he said, well if that’s what you know, Bezos wants, there’s other people that will handle that. So they reluctantly do that. And all the goods flood back in. Right. And ironically, their boss who told them not to do that is now the VP of customer safety and trust. That’s amazing. But my book found other examples. Amazon was selling carbon monoxide detectors that don’t detect carbon monoxide.
00:17:32 [Speaker Changed] Well you know, that’s extra if you want it to actually work, there’s a fake Yeah. That that, that’s a different, that’s that’s carbon monoxide prime. You know, you can’t just order early, you know, in the two thousands and 2010s, it felt like the reason people were terrified of Amazon is huge selection. Fairly high quality product. And the prices were almost always the cheapest. I don’t find any of those things now. The selection is sort of a, it, it’s para paradoxically. There’s so much garbage on it. Like when this, when they first started marketplace, my immediate reaction was, hey, if I wanted products from a garage sale, I know where eBay is, I could click over there. Why are you making this worse? But I guess you know it, it’s worked out for ’em Well,
00:18:23 [Speaker Changed] There’s a reason for that. You know, Amazon has been sued for being an illegal monopoly. And the idea here is that, you know, when, when a company is building Monopoly, they have to have the best experience ’cause they have to steal market share from their competitors. So when Amazon was coming up, when you liked the experience, it was fast shipping. The quality was much better. The prices were low. ’cause they were using predatory pricing to undercut their rivals to steal market share, get people to sign up for Prime and put companies outta business. You know, when’s the last time you saw a Circuit City?
00:18:52 [Speaker Changed] Right. Circuit City linens and things. Linens, toys are us. It goes on,
00:18:55 [Speaker Changed] Go down the list. Right. And I spoke to all those CEOs for this book and they, they lived it firsthand. Amazon was undercutting them on price to steal their customers and, and put them outta business. What happens to a monopoly once they become a monopoly is that there’s less competition. Now you could raise
00:19:09 [Speaker Changed] Prices,
00:19:10 [Speaker Changed] Where are you gonna go? Right. So they could raise prices, they could flood the feed with advertisements that are annoying to you. They could do all these things to make it a lesser experience. But have you canceled your Prime account? Probably not. I
00:19:20 [Speaker Changed] Haven’t canceled my prime account. But I will tell you that I have dramatically reduced the products I buy on Amazon. And very often in the old days it’s like, oh, it’s on Amazon. Remember one click buying. Yes. There is no more one click buying. Because when you see something, especially if it’s something you’re not familiar with, the price, you have to quickly Google, Walmart, target and Google shopping to see. ’cause every now and then a third party seller will have a product that’s double or you know, 50% more than what it should be. I just bought something from Target the other day that was $22. It was $34 on Amazon and it wasn’t being sold by Amazon, but it was by a marketplace. Well
00:20:02 [Speaker Changed] That’s why also part of this building, the monopoly situation is that Amazon’s third party sellers, 60% of what’s sold on Amazon is these third party sellers. They are so reliant on Amazon because 40% of everything sold online is there that they have to be there. And it’s this weird love-hate relationship.
00:20:18 [Speaker Changed] We’re gonna go into the details on some of the really dubious things that, that they did on the
00:20:23 [Speaker Changed] Price raises.
00:20:23 [Speaker Changed] Okay. Just across the board. We’ll talk about, I mean the book is kind of horrifying as you, I don’t know if that was your intention, but as you’re walking, working through it, it’s like, oh this company has some ethical compromises and some just culture that seems to be really toxic. Not just for the customers but the employees as well and the partners. It seems across the board it’s win at all costs. And you don’t often stop and think what that means, but it means a lot of really bad things according to your book.
00:20:55 [Speaker Changed] It does.
00:20:56 [Speaker Changed] Let’s talk a little bit about how Amazon’s culture got to where it is today. Going back to its origin story, Bezos works at hedge fund Quant Shop de Haw. And he’s given the task along with three other employees of investigating this newfangled internet thingy and what the possible areas for growth and disruption might come out of it. Three or four different analysts were given different sections. Bezos’s was tasked with looking into the impact of the internet on retail directly by David Shaw. Tell us a little bit about that project. How long on de Shaw’s dime was Bezos researching the internet
00:21:45 [Speaker Changed] Months. And he liked what he saw at the time. The idea that this would take off was really farfetched. 3%,
00:21:52 [Speaker Changed] 93, 94, something like that.
00:21:53 [Speaker Changed] This is 93 and 3% of Americans had ever been on the worldwide web. Right. So think of it. And you know, and, and David Shaw was the nerdy programmer type of person who could see the potential for it. So he thinks, let’s have my, you know, my star associates and VPs look into the commercial uses for the internet. One looks into banking and Jeff looks into retail. And and the idea is if they think it’s worth the worthwhile that De Shaw will open up these verticals and they do it with the other areas, the the people that research the other areas for, for David start businesses for him that make money.
00:22:29 [Speaker Changed] Why didn’t David Shaw invest in Bezos and Amazon when, when he left for Seattle? Well,
00:22:36 [Speaker Changed] So then Bezos likes what he sees all on de Shaw’s dime. He does his research report, sees that there’s legs for this, thinks that books could be the first area of selling online. And he goes on this walk with David in the, in Central Park and says, Hey, I think I’m going to quit and start an online bookshop. And David said, you know, I think that’s, you already have a really good job. I think that’s a good idea for someone else. And by the way, you know, that was my idea. We might go head to head with you and compete with you on this. And, and Bezos basically says, I’ll take the risk and moves out to Seattle.
00:23:07 [Speaker Changed] Kind of surprised that Shaw went that way instead of saying, you know, sort of let us seed you let us, let us participate in this. Like it was a little adversarial as opposed to cooperative.
00:23:21 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And and actually Bezos had a really hard time fundraising this idea. Yeah. Because it was so wild. You know, it took him a really long time to get his first million dollars. Most of his investments trickled in in $50,000 increments.
00:23:33 [Speaker Changed] Right. Literally friends and family. Oh
00:23:35 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Big
00:23:36 [Speaker Changed] Time. Until including parents eventually. Right. Who was the first VC to put money into? I
00:23:40 [Speaker Changed] Believe it was Kleiner Kleiner per, because they were on the board and
00:23:44 [Speaker Changed] Oh, that’s right. John Doer was on the board for forever. That’s okay. So, so really kind of interesting that he missed it. But the whole thing, just the way I learned about it, it’s kind of shady isn’t it?
00:23:56 [Speaker Changed] I mean it’s copycat mentality that continues to this day at Amazon. Oh that’s a good idea. Be shame if someone took it.
00:24:04 [Speaker Changed] So Amazon is not only cluster obsessed as Bezos once said, but it’s also competitor obsessed. Where does that come from and how does it manifest itself?
00:24:15 [Speaker Changed] Oh, they’re the most competitor obsessed company I’ve ever covered and I’ve covered companies for 18 years. It, part of it is the culture because they have to be performing at all times to justify their existence to not get cut. It’s this pressure cooker of an environment that people that I’ve spoken to that might’ve worked at other companies wouldn’t be tempted to do illegal things, unethical things, anti-competitive things are sort of forced to their breaking point at Amazon. And I’ll, I could give you an example if you like. There’s a scene in the book that has resonated with a lot of people where Amazon, at Jeff’s behest wanted to create like a Trader Joe’s like product line of food. He liked that Trader Joe’s is quirky and cool. So the, the team at Amazon writes this six pager. That’s how they come up with ideas and it says we want to copy the top 200 bestselling items at Trader Joe’s. And they get the green light from management to do that. But Trader Joe’s is a really secretive company. They don’t do online shopping. It’s hard to figure out what the best sellers are. Literally
00:25:12 [Speaker Changed] You gotta walk through the store and see what’s, you have to
00:25:13 [Speaker Changed] Walk through the store. Right. And people love to do it. It’s like a really delightful experience. Right. So the head of the team goes about hiring the senior executive from Trader Joe’s. She doesn’t really know what her job’s gonna be. Moves out to Seattle. And her first week in Seattle stumbles across this really secretive room conference room. It’s has paper over the doors and the walls brown paper so you can’t see inside. And she goes inside and it’s filled with Trader Joe’s boxes of foods. And she has this light bulb moment like, oh crap, I’ve been hired to replicate my former employer. From there, her boss starts hounding her saying Give me any documents you retained from your time at Trader Joe’s. And which is clearly
00:25:55 [Speaker Changed] Like, and the collect correct answer is, I have no documents. They made me turn everything in as per my prior employment agreement. Or
00:26:03 [Speaker Changed] If I do, I cannot give them over to, ’cause that’s actually illegal. Right. Okay. So she says no, the boss keeps hounding her, hounding her and like it becomes this really tense experience. Then she emails him the top selling items from Trader Joe’s from one whole week in the US ranked by products, you know, that were sold. And they start to disseminate that within the team. They have their blueprint to copy the top 200 items at Trader Joe’s. And then he doesn’t stop there. He says, now send me all the margins. Really? And she says, no, I’m not doing that. And he screams at her in the middle of the Seattle office, she starts crying and someone reports it to HR because it was just like such a clear violation. And Amazon actually fired those people because it went up to hr. But that sort of scenario plays out at Amazon every single team.
00:26:46 [Speaker Changed] I wanna stay with the idea of some of the earlier advantages that Amazon had and how it, how it resulted in in their growth. We’ll get to diapers.com, we’ll get to some of the other competitors. Let’s talk about the state tax advantage. Mm. So talk about arbitrage. Bezos specifically picks Washington state because there’s so few shoppers in the state that by locating there and shipping to the rest of the country, he doesn’t believe he has to collect state sales tax because of an old Supreme Court case. Maybe it even involved a catalog. It wasn’t Sears, was
00:27:29 [Speaker Changed] It? It was a catalog. It wasn’t
00:27:30 [Speaker Changed] Sears. Yeah. That said, Hey, you only collect interstate commerce is not taxable, therefore you don’t have to collect it. It’s only unless you have a nexus to that state. So immediately they’re at a six, seven, 8% advantage over everybody else in, in most states. Tell us how they push the envelope with state sales tax.
00:27:53 [Speaker Changed] Oh, this was simultaneously brilliant but like horrifying for the rest of retail. He comes up with this idea that his warehouses don’t count as physical locations for Amazon.
00:28:03 [Speaker Changed] Which is kind of bizarre because of course it is.
00:28:06 [Speaker Changed] Right? And so,
00:28:08 [Speaker Changed] I mean if you locate a warehouse in New York, you now have a nexus with New York. But
00:28:12 [Speaker Changed] They tried to carve that out as a separate entity and up until 2017 Amazon was not collecting sales tax in some states. So
00:28:20 [Speaker Changed] They had a 20 year headstart.
00:28:21 [Speaker Changed] Exactly. And up to 10% in some of these states. Wow. And that just had ripple effects because people, once the advent of online shopping came about, people became really price conscious, you know, people would do comparison shopping. And I spoke to, you know, one of the presidents of Sears who had to deal with this head on and he said, you know, Amazon and him would be selling the same Sony television. Let’s say it’s $500 market, the price Amazon for many states could sell that for $500 flat. Sears would have to charge 8% sales tax in New York. So what would Sears do? They would cut the price of their TV by 8% in order to go head to head with Amazon and they would just completely destroy their margins. And it created this race to the bottom on electronics prices. ’cause they had to try to compete but at a loss. And this happened in so many companies where they either couldn’t compete and they lost the sale to Amazon or they cut their prices and they destroyed their margins. And that’s like a very easy way to go bankrupt.
00:29:21 [Speaker Changed] So, so with the benefit of hindsight, you look at they have this advantage for 20 years, which is a long time. I’m kind of shocked that states didn’t stand up and say not only are we losing jobs in our states, but we’re losing tens of millions or hundreds of million in tax revenue. Revenue. Why did the various states tolerate this for as long as they did?
00:29:45 [Speaker Changed] That’s a really good question. I spoke to someone in Amazon’s public policy office that worked on this and he said like, this was our secret sauce. And Amazon fought tooth and nail to preserve it, to not get rid of this advantage they had. And so they, you know, they’d go to court, they would go before Congress and make their case. And some states did come knocking.
00:30:02 [Speaker Changed] Wherever there is in a a, a state income tax, there’s usually a state sales tax of Tennessee. So, right. So if, if you open a, a warehouse there and the state is losing a lot of revenue, why, why wouldn’t they just sue Amazon and say, Hey you, we figured out you, you sold this many goods in our state and you owe sales tax here ’cause you have a nexus. Well
00:30:22 [Speaker Changed] What part of what I found is that many of these legislators in the states were very shortsighted. They wanted to put out press releases that, oh we got an Amazon warehouse with all of these temporary jobs. And there’s this horrible scene in the book where Jerry Storch, who’s the CEO of toys arrest at the time, which is one of New Jersey’s largest employers. Okay.
00:30:39 [Speaker Changed] Right. Speaks to Chris Christie. He speaks
00:30:41 [Speaker Changed] To Chris Christie, he says, you you guys are killing me. Why are you not making Amazon collect sales tax in New Jersey? You’re putting toys, arrest outta business, you’re gonna put Main Street outta business. And Chris Christie sort of Yay. Yeah. Ya him. And then a year later they announced this big Amazon warehouse in Robinsville, New Jersey. They give Amazon all these tax credits for it and Chris Christie gets to put out the press release that they’re bringing hundreds of jobs to New Jersey. But Jerry’s whole point was, okay, you’re getting hundreds of jobs there, you’re gonna lose thousands of jobs just from my one company. Right. So that’s really shortsighted and that’s what happened out, you know, toys re outta business.
00:31:13 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s amazing how effective they were manipulating so many self- interested politicians who were so shortsighted. But we saw that time and time again. It was fascinating that the Amazon two HQ was slated for New York and a lot of people in New York said, this is a money losing deal. This isn’t, this is a wealthy company. Why do we have to give them tax breaks? They have to compete with everybody else. And they said, screw you. We’re going to
00:31:39 [Speaker Changed] DC and New York was one of the rare cities to really call them out on that. Just think about the frenzy around hundreds of different cities lobbied and put in these very intensive applications for the pleasure of having these warehouse jobs and, and the second headquarters there. And that just shows how politicians, you know, really just want the jobs.
00:31:59 [Speaker Changed] Right. That’s right. And so it was kind of interesting that when you ran the numbers as people in New York did, it wasn’t a good deal. And they ended up sort of splitting it. It’s kind of part in Virginia and where, where did the rest of the Amazon headquarters end up going? Oh,
00:32:16 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s in Virginia, but they, they haven’t broken ground on a lot of it anyways. Oh really?
00:32:20 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. So that, that was years ago. Yeah. I mean, after all those crazy contests and RFPs and submissions, they got like 200 cities applying for this. Exactly. They still haven’t broken ground. That’s amazing.
00:32:32 [Speaker Changed] They have one building up for sure. But it, the whole plan has not come to
00:32:36 [Speaker Changed] Fruition. I ironically, if you take the Long Island Expressway out past Jericho Syosset, you’ll see this immense warehouse that they built that used to just be like an empty parking lot. I don’t know what was there if for years it was rumored that something was coming and what a perfect location right off the highway. Why do you need to give, you know, that gives them access to 40 million people or 50 million people online. And why would you have to give them a tax break for that? That’s where the customers are. Shouldn’t their business model be able to accommodate building warehouse?
00:33:12 [Speaker Changed] I mean, they have something like $6.5 billion in subsidies on taxes from different jurisdictions around the us. It’s pretty staggering.
00:33:20 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. That that’s really, that’s really amazing. The, the other thing that was so disruptive was how Amazon changed how Wall Street itself viewed retailers both in terms of profit versus growth and startups versus established retailers. Talk a little bit about the impact Amazon had on how Wall Street thought about other companies. Yeah,
00:33:42 [Speaker Changed] This was huge. There probably wouldn’t be an Amazon today if Jeff not did not convince Wall Street that we don’t have to make profits.
00:33:48 [Speaker Changed] Right. His initial shareholder letter was, Hey, don’t expect profits for the next 10 or 20 years. Exactly.
00:33:54 [Speaker Changed] And, and that just was not the norm back then. It is today. But that was definitely not the norm. And this just gave him a tremendous roadway to reinvest in his business and grow and steal, share and cut on prices to get customers
00:34:07 [Speaker Changed] And not pay federal taxes. ’cause if you’re not profitable, no taxes. That’s
00:34:11 [Speaker Changed] A great point. Low, low tax tax rate. And that, that really destroyed his competitors because they couldn’t catch up with him on online shopping. I spoke to a lot of these CEOs who went head to head with Amazon in the 1990s and two thousands. One of them was the CEO of linens and things. And I said, you know, why were you all so late to online shopping? Did you not believe in it? And he said, Dana, we believed in it, but my boardroom, my board of directors laughed me out of the room when I asked for a hundred million dollars to get our e-commerce leg and logistics up and running because that would’ve tanked our earnings. That would’ve tanked our share price. There’s
00:34:44 [Speaker Changed] A little bit of short-termism there because, and again, I, we have the benefit of hindsight, but he obviously saw what was coming. Why can’t you say to the board, look, here’s the trade off. Either we spend a hundred million dollars now and be able to compete with them or we and, and lose some stock price for a a couple of quarters or years or we’re dead. Those are your choices. Yeah. You want, you want a little bit of a, a pullback now or you just want to go bankrupt. I mean retail, which there’s nothing in between
00:35:15 [Speaker Changed] Retail. Retail’s a notoriously hard business. It could be low margin and they have to manage to Wall Street quarter after quarter, quarter to quarter. And they couldn’t, you know, the CEO told me we couldn’t miss one quarter of earnings, let alone years of them like Bezos did. I’d be out of a job, I would be fired, the company could go bankrupt. And that was exactly what was going on in every company that was trying to compete with them to the point where so many of them had outsourced their logistics to Amazon, which was their main competitor.
00:35:40 [Speaker Changed] Go go through the list, toys R us, linens and things Target. Why on Earth would Target, which is a giant company outsource its e-commerce to Amazon. Well,
00:35:50 [Speaker Changed] Jerry Storch, who was the CEO of Toys us first worked@targeton.com and he told me a story that he got yelled at by senior leaders for spending $10,000 on buying the domain name target stores.com.
00:36:03 [Speaker Changed] That’s an amazing story in the book. I I, which is like $10,000 for a domain like that is a rounding act.
00:36:08 [Speaker Changed] They have to be so careful with their money because it’s a hard business. Right. And so yeah, target Borders toys us, toys us and they, they had to outsource it, which meant Amazon kept their customer data. They paid Amazon a fee for shipping it. They paid Amazon a fee for listing it. They paid Amazon all these fees and Amazon had all the upside.
00:36:28 [Speaker Changed] And they figured out, you write in the book, they figured out that if they were losing 65, $70 million a year on their site, hey we could charge ’em 50 million. And it’s a cost saving for them. Yeah. They just
00:36:39 [Speaker Changed] Came up with an arbitrary number below that
00:36:42 [Speaker Changed] Threshold. Just, just, just astonishing. So let’s stay with books for a minute. I, I’m fascinated that Barnes and Noble tries to respond very aggressively to Amazon and they figure we’re gonna take over wholesaler Ingram in order to get a little more bulk, be able to withstand Amazon, which at that point had become a substantial market share of the book selling world and Amazon gets the takeover stopped on antitrust grounds. How ironic, explain what happened there. Yeah,
00:37:14 [Speaker Changed] So Barnes and Noble, in order to stay competitive, tries to buy Ingram, this book distributor that Amazon also used. And Amazon cried foul and said, this should be an antitrust violation. And basically Amazon, even today sometimes has this mentality that they are the David going up against Goliath, even though that has not been true for a very, very long time, including in that anecdote, Amazon by market value was way bigger than Barnes and Noble at that time. And Len Riggio, the CEO of Barnes and Noble at the time, calls them out on it. He says, you’re, you’re crying foul and pretending like this is gonna hurt the this little player, but you are the behemoth here. Amazing. You know, the, the regulators do turn it down. So
00:37:49 [Speaker Changed] We were talking earlier about Amazon’s lack of profitability for the first couple of years. It’s kind of interesting how Bezos’s initial shareholder letter, I I wanna say 96, something like that, seven I believe 97 the same year as the IPO warned investors not to expect profits for years to come. We’re gonna spend a billion dollars building out our website. Not only did did this not have a negative impact, wall Street applauded the profitless growth. Tell us a little bit about what an advantage and, and how prescient that shareholder letter from Bezos was.
00:38:29 [Speaker Changed] I mean, he trained his shareholders essentially to not expect anything. And he was very clear communicating that. But it also just gave them roadway to take all their money and say, you know, books are not the be all end all. We’re gonna use this as a test case. We’re gonna make some money and then we’re gonna take all that money and put it into expanding our verticals. Let’s open this up to toys, let’s open this up to electronics. It allowed them to build the everything store and then it allowed them to put this money toward other areas of growth beyond retail and really create this Amazon octopus.
00:38:59 [Speaker Changed] Hmm. To say, to say the very least. Let, let’s talk about Amazon Web services. I love the part of the book where you describe how this became a thing. Every time they would stand up a new vertical or open a new division and people forget what it was like in the nineties and early two thousands before there was an AWS you had to go out and buy a couple hundred servers and a lot of software engineers to put this together and to manage it. And then you had to build, like you were reinventing the wheel every time there was a new startup. Tell us about how Andy Jassy kind of looked at this and said, Hey, why don’t we just do this once and scale it for ourselves and maybe someone else will wanna buy the excess from
00:39:42 [Speaker Changed] Us. Yeah. So Andy Jassy, who’s the CEO today started at Amazon a few, like a little bit before the IPO. So he’s been there from the early days. Amazon’s retail business was expanding so rapidly and they had so much data and they needed so much computing power that they were continuously adding that to their own business. And they got good at it. Jeff and Andy and a few other people started figuring out like, Hey, yeah, we’re a retail company, but we’re also good at this technology stuff if we need this. Other companies probably also need this as they explore expanding online. So they productized it, they created a company called Amazon Web Services. It was very iffy as to whether this would take off. They didn’t dedicate a ton of resources to it at the beginning. Andy remembers sheepishly asking for like a few dozen employees to work on it with him and thought that was like a big deal standalone. If this were to be split off from Amazon would be one of the biggest tech companies in the world on its own. Right.
00:40:31 [Speaker Changed] How successful is. Right. And the, one of the biggest sources of profits for Amazon as well,
00:40:35 [Speaker Changed] It’s an enormous source of profits.
00:40:36 [Speaker Changed] It’s so they high margin. So they start out with storage, they start out, they add computes, they add a number of different services that just allow anybody, you don’t have to go buy a bunch of servers. And and that really led to an enormous adoption cycle by a lot of tech startups, a lot of small companies that hey, you don’t need a hundred million dollars worth of junk, it’s two guys on a laptop and you can launch a business.
00:41:00 [Speaker Changed] Exactly. And also a lot of their competitors, a lot of their fiercest competitors, Netflix, apple use AWS, the CIA uses AWS. Right. So this is a really entrenched business product for them. And it’s very sticky. Once you’re on it, you don’t really leave.
00:41:14 [Speaker Changed] So it’s kind of interesting what happens in other areas of Amazon where there’s supposed to be a Chinese wall between you as a customer of their corporate services and the rest of their business. But you described time and time again in the book how that Chinese wall really doesn’t exist. Anybody has access to everything throughout the company. Let, let’s talk a little bit about marketplace. All right, so originally Amazon chased, eBay launched an auction site. It actually failed. And the pivot was to marketplace, Hey, let’s bring in third party sellers of stuff rather than auctions just selling it at standard prices. That’s now more than half of the, the business.
00:41:54 [Speaker Changed] It’s more than 60% of the retail
00:41:56 [Speaker Changed] Sales. Wow. That, that’s amazing. So that becomes wildly successful. But all of these small businesses that sell in marketplace, they haven’t been very happy with how marketplace works. Tell us what’s going on.
00:42:10 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. They have this uncomfortable situation of selling on marketplace, relying on it for their income, but then also seeing a lot of their products that they’ve gone to great lengths to use r and d to create showing up in very similar versions in Amazon’s private label side of the business called Amazon Basics or Amazon Essentials. And for years they’ve alleged that Amazon stole my idea. And Amazon has always very vocally refuted that notion. They say, you know, this is, there’s firewalls we would never copy our own sellers. And they’ve, they’ve disputed that and I was able to get documentation and find the receipts that they’ve been doing this for a very long time. So
00:42:48 [Speaker Changed] Let’s put a little flesh on that. So Amazon is both the platform to these third party sellers as well as a original competitor. Not merely selling other people’s products, but creating their own. Anything that’s a hot seller on Amazon, they are aware of through their own data. And they look at it, they look at the margin, they figure out how cheaply can we make this and how, how much do we want to go after this? They’ve been pretty aggressive about that, haven’t they?
00:43:15 [Speaker Changed] They have. I mean the documents that I was given shows how they reverse engineer these bestselling products and they have everything from the number of items sold to the cost to, to sell them to the number of returns to the margins. There’s 25 different fields that the employees on the private label side of, of the company who have been told you probably shouldn’t be doing this there, there’s policies in place at Amazon that are essentially not enforced. Right. And because they’re afraid of losing their jobs and not hitting their numbers, they’ve often resorted to looking over the fence and taking this type of data to reverse engineer bestselling hits because it makes them look good and it keeps their jobs. And Amazon even on under oath told Congress that they were not doing this.
00:43:56 [Speaker Changed] Really? Yes. Under oath. And yet it’s pretty obvious they’ve been doing this and doing it for a long time. Let’s talk a little bit about Alexa and, and how they sent up a venture fund that was very different than the typical venture funds. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with Voice and Alexa inside of Amazon. Yeah,
00:44:15 [Speaker Changed] Amazon was one of the pioneers of this voice technology and, you know, these voice assisted robots. And as such, they set up this VC arm called the Alexa Fund. And what I learned was that there a pattern played out. They’d have all of these CEOs and founders pitch them on getting money and seed investments for their companies. And under the auspices of EV either getting an investment or being bought by Amazon’s m and a arm, they’d share all of their proprietary data. Things like, you know, their patents, their technologies, all the stuff that companies go to great lengths to keep secret because they think they’re getting an investment. And time and time again, Amazon would take that information and bring the heads of different Amazon businesses to these meetings to learn from it and then ghost them and introduce the same exact product from an Amazon brand. Months later,
00:45:00 [Speaker Changed] You, you talk about the firewalls and the VCs and, and one entrepreneur is in a a, a meeting with a bunch of people, Hey, who are those guys? I know who you are. I knew who are, who are these guys? And it turns out they’re the product heads that are gonna be making the compet products competing product. It’s really the, the, I I like the VC quote, Amazon is a wolf and wolf’s clothing. Like Exactly. There’s a very really not even a a, a big attempt to hide it. A different part of the book describes an entrepreneur where there are people in the room with their arms closed looking bored and like not usual venture capital behavior. If you are really interested in this technology, they eventually figure out this is just a, not a fishing, fishing expedition.
00:45:49 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Yeah. That was notebook fishing
00:45:51 [Speaker Changed] Is too, too kind. You call it specifically VC espionage. Yeah. Talk, talk a little bit about how misleading even the NDAs were. The non-disclosure
00:46:02 [Speaker Changed] Group. Oh my God. This was galling to me as a deal geek who covered m and a. I asked some of these founders I spoke to for the book to send me all the documents that Amazon gave them prior to these meetings. And I read them very thoroughly and found something called a residuals clause buried in the legalese. And it basically said that anything retained in the memories of Amazon executives at these meetings where proprietary stuff is being disclosed could be used with by Amazon in their own business without any legal repercussions. So it’s a license to steal.
00:46:32 [Speaker Changed] So, so essentially, and, and I keep coming back to this from the original Dehua issue, the culture at Amazon, they hired senior lawyers from some of the best firms. It seems like ethics is completely irrelevant. It seems like this is a group of rogue capitalists who are just rapacious in their greed regardless of ethics and business standards. They’re just operating in a gray zone of legality, but in a very black and white zone of ethics. These are bad people doing bad things.
00:47:08 [Speaker Changed] The interesting thing is, so many of my sources for this book are the people doing the bad things. ’cause once they take a step back from Amazon and they realize how this company pushed them to their breaking point, that it made them do things that they would’ve not have done at a company that was not so cutthroat. They feel bad.
00:47:25 [Speaker Changed] They should, they have a guilty conscious ’cause they did really bad things for the money. They could feel bad about it after the fact. But let’s be blunt, they had big stock options and, and reasonable pay packages. And if you’re coming over from a, a top 20 law firm where you’re giving up a seven figure job, you’re doing it because you have the chance to make 10 figures in, in your stock options. So I I feel bad that they feel bad. Not really. They, they did bad things because they were in for the money and they realized the trade off wasn’t worth it. Sell your soul for a few bucks. You still made a deal with the devil.
00:48:01 [Speaker Changed] I would agree with you. And, and you know, that’s the one thing I wanted to depict in this book is the human toll of that. I mean, when I was reporting out that chapter, you’re just describing the founders that would cry to me on the phone about what happened to their companies, how Amazon just decimated them. It was really hard reporting just as a journalist to like internalize a lot of that, that this company that didn’t need to do these things to win, chose to. Right. And it cost people their jobs, their livelihoods, their technologies at what cost.
00:48:27 [Speaker Changed] Let, let’s talk a little bit about diapers.com and what was the parent company quiz? Be
00:48:31 [Speaker Changed] Qui quizzy.
00:48:31 [Speaker Changed] Quizzy. So, so this is kind of interesting. Amazon can’t figure out how to ship diapers quickly. Right. And moms are a giant demographic in retail. I think the book says they make 84% of the consumer spending the control the wallet decisions in the household. Like they’re, you win the moms, you win retail and these guys have figured out how to have diapers arrive next day. Like they, they figured out how to reach moms and Amazon decides to go after them. Yeah. And they, they start predatory pricing, selling diapers 20% below cost. Which one would think is illegal. Isn’t that
00:49:11 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, it’s the definition of predatory pricing. It’s 2010. Jeff Bezos becomes laser focused on zi, which is started by these two entrepreneurs that are like the first people in their, in their families to even go to college. Right. These are homegrown talent, right. Mark, Lori and, and Veni ra. Right. And he puts together a team to essentially spy on them and figure out how they do it. And Amazon starts to really cut the prices of their own diapers. 30%. They cut the price of their diapers so much that they start losing $200 million a month just on diapers according to internal documents. I
00:49:43 [Speaker Changed] Retained that’s, that’s 2.2 billion a year on diapers alone because
00:49:46 [Speaker Changed] They were so threatened by this little startup in New Jersey. Okay. Right. And Amazon eventually makes a buyout offer to this firm, but they don’t wanna do it because they’re doing so well. They think they could IPO one day. Right. So they turn them down. So then Amazon ratchets up the heat cuts price of diapers more, creates this loyalty program to incentivize moms to shop with Amazon, not Quidsi. And it becomes to the point where it’s untenable for the Quizzy people. They start missing their internal numbers. They have to start considering a sale. Unfortunately, they’re really crestfallen about that. Amazon’s one of the biggest players in the space. They even have to consider an offer from the person that did this to them. Okay. So they’re at this private dinner with Amazon executives discussing this offer. They don’t wanna sell to Amazon. And Mark Lori’s Blackberry at the time gets an email popup and it’s an offer from Walmart and they’re excited. So they,
00:50:36 [Speaker Changed] For like a hundred million dollars more than the five and change Exactly five 50. Amazon had offered. It’s
00:50:41 [Speaker Changed] A higher offer and it’s not the company that’s destroyed them. So they go in the hallway, they discuss it and they say, let’s take this Walmart offer. They go back into the room with the Amazon executives, they say, Hey, just wanna let you know we got this offer. It’s better for our shareholders. We’re gonna go in this direction. And they’re told by a senior Amazon executive, okay, you go ahead and do that and we’re gonna cut the price of our diapers to zero. That
00:51:02 [Speaker Changed] Seems legal, right? We’re gonna give our diapers away to put you outta business and prevent you from selling to our competitor Walmart.
00:51:08 [Speaker Changed] Right. And the people in that room knew that if Walmart had decided to acquire Qui Z and Amazon put them out of, you know, created this pricing more, that they were selling diapers for either zero or like a dollar
00:51:20 [Speaker Changed] Material change. And exactly, in fact, elements that would lead to the deal falling
00:51:24 [Speaker Changed] Apart, Walmart could back away from the deal scot free. So they were forced to sell to their main competitor who put them in this position. And this created, you know, generational wealth for those two men who didn’t even go to for a drink to celebrate. ’cause they were so upset.
00:51:37 [Speaker Changed] Now what, what did they end up doing in the future post that, that purchase? Oh,
00:51:43 [Speaker Changed] They shut it down. They shut down Quidsi.
00:51:46 [Speaker Changed] They just took all the clients. They took the,
00:51:48 [Speaker Changed] It ran for a few years,
00:51:49 [Speaker Changed] But doesn’t exist and then eventually exist was folded in’t exist. The two guys who created Qui Z did they do anything else in the future?
00:51:54 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, mark Lori went on to start a company called jet.com. He sold that,
00:51:58 [Speaker Changed] Which gets why
00:51:59 [Speaker Changed] Walmart buys it, right? For a very significant sum. Couple
00:52:02 [Speaker Changed] Of billion bucks
00:52:03 [Speaker Changed] He now owns, if you live in New York, there’s a place called Wonder, this restaurant company. That’s his, I actually really like Wonder. So he’s doing that now. So he, I mean this, he’s gone on to do really big things. So
00:52:12 [Speaker Changed] The, the fascinating thing is, after being forced to sell the diapers.com company to amazon jet.com became essentially the backend of all of Walmart online retailing. So I wanna say he got a little bit of payback whether, whether or not he, he, you know, put as much pain to Amazon as Amazon put to him is, is arguable, but it was pretty obvious. And you make it clear in the book, he was imagine getting bought for $550 million and leaving dejected. I know it, it’s kind of amazing.
00:52:49 [Speaker Changed] It is, it really is. I mean, I just, I think it speaks to like the pain and suffering they went through with this m and a battle.
00:52:55 [Speaker Changed] What are the things that kind of shocked me? You mentioned what a difficult place to work Amazon is. They even back load their stock options. Your stock options are like if you work at Google or somewhere else, you get stock options and they’ll vest in three years and you could start selling, or at least that’s what it used to be. I don’t know what it is these days, but they backloaded it’s five 15, year three is 40% of your stock options. Year four is 40%. You really have to stick it out, don’t you?
00:53:27 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And that creates this pernicious cycle. The average white collar employee at Amazon lasts a year and a half. That’s amazing because of the cultures. So most of them leave their stock options on the table. But if you wanna get your full payout, you have to survive. You have to not be part of that bottom 6%. And that creates that pressure cooker of an environment that I talk about.
00:53:45 [Speaker Changed] So, so let’s ask the question about the big question. Is Amazon a monopoly? Have they remade corporate power in their own image? And what sort of antitrust enforcement might we expect in the future?
00:53:58 [Speaker Changed] Well, governments around the world, including our government, have said it is a monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit last year saying it’s an illegal monopoly and the lawsuit says it could be broken up.
00:54:10 [Speaker Changed] What about Europe? They, they’ve been pretty strict about Amazon as well. E
00:54:13 [Speaker Changed] The EU was way ahead of us on policing our own giants. Marri Beste was looking into Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple years ago. And people thought she was crazy,
00:54:23 [Speaker Changed] Right? So we’re recording this a week before the election. We don’t know what the outcome is gonna be, but it appears that no matter who wins, Amazon’s gonna stay in the FTCs crosshairs because Lena Kahn works for the Biden Harris administration. It, the assumption is if Harris wins, she continues. And Trump really dislikes Bezos because of his ownership of the Washington Post and has said Amazon should be broken up. What’s it like inside the lobbying arm of Amazon heading into this election?
00:54:59 [Speaker Changed] You know, it’s really fascinating. I don’t know which administration they would want to win. They, you know, they had a really painful four years under Trump where he was just berating them online every day alleging that Jeff Bezos was using the Washington Post as a political tool to attack him the
00:55:14 [Speaker Changed] Amazon, Washington Post,
00:55:15 [Speaker Changed] The Amazon Washington Post. That that should be a lobbyist according to him. So that was like super painful. But then the Biden administration came in where they had good connections and that was even more painful in some ways. You know, Biden chooses Lena Kahn to be the head of the FTC. She brings forward the lawsuit against Amazon for being a monopoly. So either way, it’s not like a really great outcome for that company.
00:55:38 [Speaker Changed] You know, the interesting thing about the antitrust enforcement against Microsoft in the nineties was just having that enforcement hanging over their head was enough to allow all these small companies to get out from under, you know, every startup had to deal with the, the question, every software startup, Hey, what’s gonna prevent Microsoft from just building these features into office or, or into Windows? And it was really challenging. The antitrust enforcement seemed to have forced them to behave better. And that, you know, that was the Cambrian explosion of, of dot coms. Might we see something similar with Amazon might online retail expand from the 40% market share Amazon has elsewhere if this antitrust work is enforced.
00:56:26 [Speaker Changed] You know, the big question is, will this FTC suit have a chilling effect on the way Amazon behaves? I would say they have more competition these days. Temu and Shian are, you know, these low cost Chinese marketplaces, but I don’t see any changes to the way Amazon is operating. You know, Andy chassis, there’s a scoop in the book that he’s telling his deputies, you know, at around the same time that they have this historic lawsuit against them for being too big, that they should be so much bigger. He tells them we should be a $10 trillion company. Okay, so how do you get to $10 trillion when you’re $2 trillion? It’s competing the way you’re, you’ve been competing.
00:57:01 [Speaker Changed] But putting supersizing it and, and since we’re talking about antitrust enforcement, it’s kind of fascinating that the entire, we, we’ve had 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement dating back to, to the Reagan administration and, and Judge Bork, who was one of the big advocates of moving away from historical antitrust enforcement. You describe in the book, Lena Kahn is a 27-year-old law student at Yale. She writes a law review paper on how much Amazon is a monopoly. And when was the last time a, a law review paper went viral like this, this completely upended what was going on. Tell us a little bit about Lena Kahn. Yeah.
00:57:47 [Speaker Changed] She was this law school student at Yale where actually Bork had been a professor. And she writes this seminal law review article saying that the antitrust laws, the way that they’re being interpreted, partially because of Bork are failing customers and consumers in the US And that Amazon’s the prime example of this. That Amazon is a monopoly and it’s allowed to be a monopoly because we’re not enforcing our antitrust laws the way that they were first derived. And this might be the only time that a law review article goes viral. Millions of people read this thing, including legislators, CEOs, it gets picked up by the New York Times, right? It becomes this like zeitgeist type of movement. It’s the first time that people start equating this company with a smile on the box with potentially being a monopoly. And she starts to, with, with the, you know, this other band of trust busters start to reshape this moment in time about whether antitrust laws are failing Americans.
00:58:40 [Speaker Changed] She makes the point that the way Amazon has become a monopoly and abuses its platform power is very reminiscent of what we saw under Standard Oil. And Rockefeller. Tell us a little bit about some of the abusive uses of, of their power that that manifest in their growth.
00:58:58 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, so she, she points to predatory pricing that Amazon was undercutting the market in those early days in order to steal share from rivals and put them outta business. She also says they’re like a utility that this isn’t a company that you might want to work with. You sort of have to work with them if you wanna reach shoppers. And that has power over the sellers on their website where they could, you know, jack up fees. It has power over lots of different competitors that feel like they’re forced to work with their main rival in order to access markets and
00:59:26 [Speaker Changed] Share a lot of data, a lot of information, share a lot of data. They would rather not as well as buy advertising from them.
00:59:32 [Speaker Changed] Advertising is another area
00:59:33 [Speaker Changed] In the book. You talk about how when Amazon enters into the marketplace with a competitive product, they shut off their competitor’s ability to advertise that product.
00:59:43 [Speaker Changed] They do. And that’s, you know, advertising’s become so core to being successful as a seller on amazon.com. ’cause there’s millions of other sellers that flywheel that if you don’t buy advertising, you’re not showing up in search. And what did Amazon do? Roku, which makes a competing device for them for streaming tv, all of a sudden they can’t buy ads anymore. You know, this happened across the devices space.
01:00:04 [Speaker Changed] And so the antitrust law is, hey, if you wanna be a platform, you could be a platform. If you wanna be a retailer, you could be a retailer, but you can’t tie your platform advertising into reducing the competitiveness of your products versus other people on the
01:00:19 [Speaker Changed] Platform. Well that’s where Congress was alleging that if you can’t own the world’s biggest online platform and also compete on it, that it has to be one or the other.
01:00:25 [Speaker Changed] Sp spin out that separate business. Right. And
01:00:28 [Speaker Changed] Do that. FTC lawsuit’s a little bit different. She alleges that actually in this current form, Amazon’s become the monopoly. They don’t have to do predatory pricing anymore. They could actually exert their power on their sellers. You know, a decade ago the average seller on Amazon gave 19 cents on the dollar back to Amazon in fees. Today that’s 45 cents on the dollar.
01:00:46 [Speaker Changed] That’s unbelievable.
01:00:48 [Speaker Changed] And that means those sellers have had to raise the price of their goods to cover Amazon’s margin or
01:00:52 [Speaker Changed] Reduce their own margin or both,
01:00:54 [Speaker Changed] Or reduce their own margin. And the FTC lawsuit says, because Amazon’s so big, and they require those sellers to also have the lowest price on Amazon that they have to raise the price on target.com and walmart.com and on and on and on. And it’s created higher prices for all of us. Huh.
01:01:08 [Speaker Changed] So are you an Amazon Prime member? Do you use Amazon?
01:01:12 [Speaker Changed] We have a Prime account ’cause my husband watches football and they have Thursday night football. Right. We don’t really shop on it though.
01:01:18 [Speaker Changed] You don’t?
01:01:19 [Speaker Changed] Very rarely.
01:01:20 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That’s really interesting. Alright, let’s jump to our favorite questions. We ask all of our guests starting with, so what are you streaming these days? What are you either listening to on Audible? What are you watching on Amazon Prime or Netflix or Apple plus? What? What’s keeping you entertained? Besides Thursday night football?
01:01:37 [Speaker Changed] I watched, nobody wants this. That was very good, charming. Really, really good. I listened to My Favorite Murder. It’s a true Crime pod podcast on a merino they call it.
01:01:46 [Speaker Changed] Tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career. Oh
01:01:50 [Speaker Changed] Gosh, I have so many of them. Joanne Lublin, who was this dynamo at the Wall Street Journal. Dana Alca, my former boss at the Wall Street Journal on m and a. Jamie Heller, who’s now the CEO of Business Insider, Dennis Berman, who is a amazing m and a reporter at the Journal. And Drew Dowell, I would say, who he’s now overseas for us.
01:02:09 [Speaker Changed] Let’s talk about books. What are your favorites? What are you reading right now? So
01:02:13 [Speaker Changed] Some of my favorites are The Moonstone by Wilkee Collins. It’s like one of the first Victorian detective mysteries. I love The Bronte’s and Jane Austen. I know that’s like pretty trite. I’m reading some just fun Halloween type of books right now. This book called Lucy Foley called The Midnight Feast. That’s been really fun. And I love Sally Rooney. I have her new book ready to read after this one. Alright,
01:02:36 [Speaker Changed] Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either journalism m and a retail? What’s your advice?
01:02:48 [Speaker Changed] Journalism. It’s, I mean, you have to hustle. I would say it’s to get as many bylines as you can, even if it’s not at one of the prestige newspapers at first. I, I fully believe the way I got hired at the Journal was freelancing my college papers, my college, you know, articles to other places to get a byline in places in, in tiny newspapers that probably don’t exist anymore. And you just have to be reporting around you all the time, making sources wherever you are, keeping a great Rolodex. So I think that’s the most important thing you could do.
01:03:18 [Speaker Changed] And, and what do you know about the world of journalism today? You wish you knew 20 years or so ago when you were first starting out?
01:03:27 [Speaker Changed] Oh my gosh. When I first started out, dot com was like, not even that much of a thing. Right? You know, wsj.com was this like bastard stepchild. Right? And that’s, that’s what I was put on actually. Oh, I, I think I, I wish I knew that you just have to be so re resilient in this profession that if you’re doing your job well, it means a lot of rejection that you’re gonna cold call people and they’re gonna hang up on you. And that’s fine. You cold call the next one. You just get up again and get up again. Because so much of journalism is a numbers game.
01:03:59 [Speaker Changed] Huh. Really, really interesting. Thank you Dana, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Dana Oli. She covers Amazon for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of the book, the Everything War, Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out any of the 500 or so previous discussions we’ve had over the past 10 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcast. And be sure and check out my new short forum podcast at the Money Short Conversations with experts about single topics that affect your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it at the money in the Masters in Business Feed or wherever you find your favorite podcast. I would be remiss if I did not thank the correct team that helps us put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my head of research. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I’m Barry Ltz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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