Amazon Ceo Quotes

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

Nine had heard whisperings that the secretive Bilderberg Group was effectively the World Government, undermining democracy by influencing everything from nations' political leaders to the venue for the next war. He recalled persistent rumors and confirmed media reports that the Bilderberg Group had such luminaries as Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. Other Bilderberg members sprung forth from Nine’s memory bank. They included the founders and CEOs of various multinational corporations like Facebook, BP, Google, Shell and Amazon, as well as almost every major financial institution on the planet.

The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.

Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made this exact argument in his 2015 letter to shareholders,33 where he introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.

It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.

AMAZONGOOGLEFACE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO ACQUIRE DISNEYAPPLESOFT The deal would result in a combined company worth approximately $97.3 quadrillion. "This will be good for consumers," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonGoogleFace, speaking from the company's offices on an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

Unlike John Lasseter’s bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon’s individual employees—even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company’s core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, “A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created a firm specifically designed to help technical founders run their own companies, we could develop a reputation and a brand that might vault us into the top tier of venture capital firms despite having no track record. We identified two key deficits that a founder CEO had when compared with a professional CEO: 1. The CEO skill set Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked. 2. The CEO network Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders, on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.

Every company has to be able to create continuous change and embrace continuous improvement. This is the Change IQ. Warren Buffet tells boards and CEOs to combat the “ABCs” (arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency) into which successful businesses and teams fall.

Nancy Peretsman of Allen & Co., a top Wall Street banker and a specialist in internet and media deals. Buffett was high on Peretsman, who had been a budding star at Salomon Brothers, the investment bank in which he was a large investor, before she joined forces with Herbert Allen. It was Peretsman who placed the first call to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, a casual friend of Graham’s for 15 years, to tell him the Post was for sale.

Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?

Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon. Take Amazon. It’s not intuitive to think a failed product launch at a major company would be normal and fine. Intuitively, you’d think the CEO should apologize to shareholders. But CEO Jeff Bezos said shortly after the disastrous launch of the company’s Fire Phone: If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now. I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.

Being able to figure out quickly what works and what doesn’t can mean the difference between survival and extinction.” —Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” —Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Jeff Bezos, who is the founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest person in modern history, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and in the firm’s early days recruited employees from among American Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford.

share price is what Amazon calls an “output metric.” The CEO, and companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics. What’s really important is to focus on the “controllable input metrics,” the activities you directly control, which ultimately affect output metrics such as share price.

Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

Racism, xenophobia and racial segregation never disappeared. These things went underground and are now being applied by companies like Google, Amazon and many others. It is not a coincidence that despite the equalization of opportunities that the internet provides, the resources of the world keep going to the same 2 countries and you keep buying information from people that live in those same 2 countries and being exposed only to products of those same 2 countries. The opportunities are not the same for everyone because they are being monopolized and controlled. The excuse of always, your security, is being used to bomb nations and also steal all of your rights, including the right to privacy and to the same opportunities. When there are threats against those nations by some who want to annihilate them, they also make you believe that this is something horrible, while making you believe that the opposite is justified. And like dumb rats in a lab experiment, the population keeps pressing the same buttons until they die in absolute misery and ignorance, fighting each other and never seeing the real enemy. Work harder, they say! The least thing they need is for you to notice these differences. They then put some Indian as the CEO or Prime Minister of one of these companies or nations to gaslight you and make you think that you are crazy, and that the opportunities exist and that they are liberal. And when your warn the dumb chickens that they are heading to the slaughterhouse, the dumb chickens, in love with their captivity and their corn, say that you are the crazy one.

Amazon follows the same fail-faster religion. Jeff Bezos, founder of the trillion-dollar e-commerce platform, sent the following memo to his shareholders when the company became the fastest ever to reach annual sales of $100 billion: One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organisations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 per cent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a set of rules.6 And while we are parsing the deep secrets of skunk, it’s to “Kelly’s rules” we must now turn. Wall the skunk works off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy—that’s what you learn if you boil Johnson’s rules down to their essence. Out of his fourteen rules, four pertain solely to military projects and can thus be excluded from this discussion. Three are ways to increase rapid iteration (a topic we’ll come back to in a moment), but the remaining seven are all ways to enforce isolation. Rule 3, for example: “The number of people with any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner.” Rule 13 is more of the same: “Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.” Isolation, then, according to Johnson, is the most important key to success in a skunk works. The reasoning here is twofold. There’s the obvious need for military secrecy, but more important is the fact that isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online. But what is true for a corporation is also true for the entrepreneur. Just as the successful skunk works isolates the innovation team from the greater organization, successful entrepreneurs need a buffer between themselves and the rest of society. As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical. In a talk given at re:Invent 2012, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos7 explains it like this: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky . . . [so] you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.

Amazon has adopted something similar for fulfillment-center workers called Pay to Quit. In an employee’s first year of work, the offer is $2,000. It goes up by $1,000 every year after that until it hits $5,000. The idea, writes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his 2014 letter to shareholders, is “to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.

In mid-2014 Amazon was asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to fly drones on its own property for research purposes. This was the latest act in CEO Jeff Bezos’s obsession with fast delivery to individual customers. The

Your margin is my opportunity.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, calls his approach “customer obsessed.” Everything is focused upon the requirements of Amazon’s customers. The competition is ignored, the traditional marketing requirements are ignored. The focus is on simple, customer-driven questions: what do the customers want; how can their needs best be satisfied; what can be done better to enhance customer service and customer value? Focus on the customer, Bezos argues, and the rest takes care of itself. Many companies claim to aspire to this philosophy, but few are able to follow it. Usually it is only possible where the head of the company, the CEO, is also the founder. Once the company passes control to others, especially those who follow the traditional MBA dictum of putting profit above customer concerns, the story goes downhill. Profits may indeed increase in the short term, but eventually the product quality deteriorates to the point where customers desert. Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”16

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.” -Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO Amazon

world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and

Customer‐centric culture. As Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon says, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

Pocos directores ejecutivos tienen competencias para más de dos de estas etapas. La mayoría de los CEO llegaron a su puesto siendo fundadores, visionarios u operadores, no pragmáticos. Muy probablemente se pueden contar con los dedos de una mano los CEOs de la historia empresarial de Estados Unidos que han dirigido eficazmente sus empresas (o han deseado hacerlo) a lo largo de todo el alfabeto. Después de todo, ¿quién quiere acompañar hacia la muerte a la gran empresa que fundó décadas atrás?

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie’s biographer, has said, “Carnegie could never have imagined the kind of power Zuckerberg has. Politics today is less relevant than it has ever been in our entire history. These CEOs are more powerful than they’ve ever been. The driving force of social change today is no longer government at all.

La característica más común de los CEO es que tienen un régimen de ejercicio regular (...) Si te mantienes en forma, serás menos propenso a la depresión, pensarás con más claridad, dormirás mejor y ampliarás tu grupo de posibles parejas (...) Trabaja ochenta horas una semana, sé el tipo que se mantiene tranquilo ante el estrés, aborda un problema grande a base de pura fuerza bruta y energía (...) Esta forma de trabajar, sin embargo, a medida que te haces mayor puede matarte de verdad. Así que hazlo pronto, mientras eres joven.

En una de sus famosas cartas a los inversores, Jeff Bezos destacó que lo que acaba con las compañías maduras es su apego poco saludable a los procesos acostumbrados. Solo hay que preguntarle a Óscar Muñoz, CEO de United Airlines, quien defendió a los empleados de la aerolínea que sacaron a un pasajero a rastras de un avión, porque «habían seguido los protocolos preestablecidos para hacer frente a ese tipo de situaciones».

Nadella has struck a powerful balance—aligning the Azure ecosystem, where Microsoft is clearly the leader, while allowing partners in the ecosystem to leverage their participation toward progress elsewhere. His goal is not to create the operating system for the intelligent car, for example, but to be the infrastructure that processes the information (at least for now). As Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman explained when announcing his choice to shift the data and applications of his fifty-one-hospital system to the Azure cloud, he chose Microsoft over Amazon, Apple, and Google because “[Microsoft isn’t] trying to be in the health-care business, but [is] trying to make it better.

When assessing and prioritizing the opportunity space, it’s important that we find the right balance between being data-informed and not getting stuck in analysis paralysis. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting more data, spending just a little bit more time, trying to get to a more perfect decision. However, we’ll learn more by making a decision and then seeing the consequences of having made that decision than we will from trying to think our way to the perfect decision. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made this exact argument in his 2015 letter to shareholders,33 where he introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.

At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary. But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.

Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO’s escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.

Roomba, made headlines when the company’s CEO, Colin Angle, told Reuters about its data-based business strategy for the smart home, starting with a new revenue stream derived from selling floor plans of customers’ homes scraped from the machine’s new mapping capabilities. Angle indicated that iRobot could reach a deal to sell its maps to Google, Amazon, or Apple within the next two years. In preparation for this entry into surveillance competition, a camera, new sensors, and software had already been added to Roomba’s premier line, enabling new functions, including the ability to build a map while tracking its own location. The market had rewarded iRobot’s growth vision, sending the company’s stock price to $102 in June 2017 from just $35 a year earlier, translating into a market capitalization of $2.5 billion on revenues of $660 million.1 Privacy

One constant theme was how Sweden’s welfare system worked to encourage risk taking. “The worst that’ll happen is that you will fail, but still be able to live in your apartment and put food on the table. That encourages you to take risks. And some of those risks pay off as world-famous companies,” Daniel said.

Strength A decent proxy for your success will be your ratio of sweating to watching others sweat (watching sports on TV). It’s not about being skinny or ripped, but committing to being strong physically and mentally. The trait most common in CEOs is a regular exercise regime. Walking into any conference room and feeling that, if shit got real, you could kill and eat the others gives you an edge and confidence (note: don’t do this). If you keep physically fit, you’ll be less prone to depression, think more clearly, sleep better, and broaden your pool of potential mates. On a regular basis, at work, demonstrate both your physical and mental strength—your grit. Work an eighty-hour week, be the calm one in face of stress, attack a big problem with sheer brute force and energy. People will notice. At Morgan Stanley, the analysts pulled all-nighters weekly, and it didn’t kill us, but made us stronger. This approach to work, however, as you get older, can in fact kill you. So, do it early.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

(there are rumors that the CEO of General Magic, Yamamoto Keiji, wasn’t surprised at all; it is rumored that he said, “That damn Hero betrayed us faster than Amazon Prime could’ve delivered it,

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, clearly agrees, as a 2012 video interview shows. “I very frequently get the question ‘What’s going to change in the next ten years?’” he said. “I almost never get the question ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed.

I knew that Bill Campbell would be the critical person I’d need to persuade one way or another. Bill was the only one of our board members who had been a public company CEO. He knew the pros and cons better than anyone else. More important, everybody always seemed to defer to Bill in these kinds of sticky situations, because Bill had a special quality about him. At the time, Bill was in his sixties, with gray hair and a gruff voice, yet he had the energy of a twenty-year-old. He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person. People offer many complex reasons for why Bill rates so highly. In my experience it’s pretty simple. No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

Amazon's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, once told me that he is often asked, 'What's going to change in the future?' But he is rarely asked, 'What is not going to change?' 'That second question is actually more important than the first,' he said, 'because you can build a strategy around it.

Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency,” says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. “Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. “Frankly, I didn’t think he could do it.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

1 per cent of the world have the same amount of money as 99 per cent of the world put together. Forty-two people hold the same wealth as 3.7 billion of the world’s poorest. The entire wealth of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon (my home-away-from-home for binge shopping at 4 a.m. for things I will never need), has increased to $122 billion. Just to give you an idea of how much that is, the whole of government spending in Ethiopia with a population of 105 million people is a mere $95 billion. Why Ethiopians aren’t hunting him down, I do not know. In 1978 the average CEO made about thirty times more than the average worker’s salary. By 2006 the CEOs have seen almost a 950 per cent increase in their earnings. Meanwhile, the average American worker has seen an 11 per cent raise. Bad News About Business

About 30 percent of founding CEOs in the billion-dollar group had not worked for anyone other than themselves before. Of those who had, about 60 percent had worked at companies with very well-known brands, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey. Those “tier-one companies” are famous for their rigorous hiring processes and their tendency to employ the best. Another 28 percent worked at “tier-two companies,” which I define as large and well-known companies that were less sought-after by top talent. Only 14 percent of founders of billion-dollar companies had worked solely at companies that were not well-known brand names.

If you were a venture capitalist, this just did not make sense anymore,” said another executive privy to the decision-making. But Bezos wanted to forge ahead. “Jeff is master of ‘this isn’t working today, but could work tomorrow.’ If customers like it, he’s got the cash flow to fund it,” this exec said. In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.