Bezos to D.C.: Drop Dead

The following story is co-published with Pete Tucker’s Substack.

Shortly after Jeff Bezos touched back down to earth in 2021, he credited those who made his space exploration possible. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ‘cause you paid for all of this,” Bezos enthused while decked out in his blue space suit.

That same year, an internal report noted that Amazon was churning through employees at such a brisk clip that the company feared exhausting the labor pool of the entire United States, a country of over 300 million people. “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” stated the report, which was obtained by Vox.

Amazon’s relentless churn — 150% a year for warehouse workers — was, for Bezos, a feature, not a bug. “In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company,” the New York Times noted in a newsletter accompanying its 2021 investigation of Amazon:

Longtime employees expected to receive raises. … And they were a potential source of internal discontent.

Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told the Times. …

In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers.

Bezos’ indifference to the workers whose backbreaking labor made him rich is remarkable. And it has me wondering where the rest of us fit into Bezos’ worldview.

‘A Thousand Mozarts’

Jeff Bezos has long believed that he can save humanity, but only by placing Earth’s heavy industries on the moon, then shipping manufactured products back to Earth, and leaving the pollution behind.

“The Earth is finite,” a teenage Bezos told his local newspaper, “and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.”

“I still believe that,” Bezos said four decades later, while doing his best Steve Jobs impersonation on a darkened stage at the D.C. convention center with a captive audience of students looking on.

With population and energy use growing exponentially, we’re on a “bad path” that leads to “rationing,” Bezos explained. But not to worry! With all the fervor of a snake oil salesman, Bezos continued:

The good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes we have unlimited resources. So we get to choose: Do we want stasis and rationing? Or do we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice.

By placing heavy industry in space, “Earth ends up zoned residential and light industry,” explained Bezos, who also made an excited pitch for humans living in space. “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system. Which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,” Bezos said.

And the weather! “These are ideal climates, these are shirtsleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes,” Bezos said in his 2019 talk, humbly entitled “For the Benefit of Earth.”

‘Directly in the first lady’s pocket’

I don’t begrudge Bezos for having a rich fantasy life. And if he wants to flit away his billions flying himself and his friends into space, I wish him all the best. Where I draw the line is at public funding.

Why billionaires like Bezos feel entitled to tap the public purse for their fantasies is beyond me. But that’s what Bezos is doing with his space company, Blue Origin, which is his true passion.

“He cares most about Blue Origin,” a longtime Bezos adviser told the Financial Times. But without federal contracts, “Blue is dead in the water,” said the adviser. “[Bezos’] chance of being the player he wants to become in space could be destroyed” if he doesn’t stay in President Donald Trump’s good graces.

So showering the first family with donations and sweetheart deals makes sense. My personal favorite is the $40 million Amazon paid for Melania Trump’s documentary, of which roughly $28 million goes “directly in the first lady’s pocket,” the Financial Times reported. The eye-popping sum makes it “probably the most expensive documentary ever paid for in history,” filmmaker Alex Holder told the Wall Street Journal.

This largesse is at best a rounding error for both Amazon, a company valued at over $2 trillion, and Bezos, who’s worth over $200 billion. But the potential upside is immense, as things can quickly go awry when Trump’s hand is on the public money spigot, as Bezos is well aware.

‘A surprising decision’

During Trump’s first term, a joke went around that the Washington Post didn’t cost Bezos $250 million — the amount he bought the paper for in 2013 — but $10 billion.

The latter figure represents the size of a Pentagon cloud computing contract that Amazon lost out on after Trump became enraged at the coverage he was receiving in the Post.

The $10 billion contract instead went to Microsoft. “It was a surprising decision since Amazon Web Services was the industry leader in cloud computing and was judged by many to have presented a stronger bid,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Amazon promptly sued, and the $10 billion contract was eventually broken into four components, one of which Amazon secured.

But Bezos was “deeply hurt” by the ordeal, the Financial Times reported. “He sat there going: ‘This is not right.’”

Having learned his lesson about crossing Trump, Bezos quietly reached out when it looked like the former president might return to office in 2024. Bezos even suggested to Trump that he select North Dakota Gov, Doug Burgum as his running mate. (Trump named Burgum to his Cabinet, as interior secretary.)

Bezos’ alignment with Trump only became public in the days before the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Once Trump won, Bezos quickly sought to remake his paper in the president’s image, thereby ensuring neither Amazon nor Blue Origin would lose out on billions in federal contracts.

“He’s prioritizing his other businesses over the Post,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron told Zeteo.

Amazon has a big cloud computing business. Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the U.S. government. Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is he going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.

Bezos to D.C.: Drop dead

While Post reporters continue to produce some excellent journalism, the paper’s transformation on the opinion side is so complete that when Trump carried out a military occupation of Washington, D.C. — the city the Post calls home — the editorial page all but rolled out the red carpet.

This is an extraordinary dereliction of journalistic duty. It’s also a fuck you to the local readers and businesses who have kept the Post viable over generations. (To experience Bezos’ fuck you in physical form, pick up a paper copy of the Post and try to find the Metro section, now buried in the back of Sports or Style.)

But I suppose we should have seen this coming. After all, if Bezos can dispose of the Amazon workers who made him rich, why should we expect him to treat D.C. residents and Post readers any better?

In Bezos’ world, he’s Player One, on an intergalactic quest to save humanity. The rest of us are NPCs (nonplayer characters). And earthly matters like journalistic integrity and democracy are beside the point.

To Bezos’ credit, he’s always been transparent about his solipsistic worldview. So have some of those around him.

“Whatever image he had of his own future, it always involved becoming wealthy. … There was no way to get what he wanted without it,” Bezos’ high school girlfriend Ursula Werner told reporters in the 1990s, according to author Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store.”

And what exactly did Bezos want? “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.”

The rest of us — Amazon workers, Post readers, etc. — are just flotsam and jetsam.