I Get Knocked Down I Get Up Again Elon Musk Bully Robot

The Dark Truth Near Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos

Getty Images

With an estimated internet worth of roughly $190 billion, Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world by a significant margin. Cheers to his due east-commerce juggernaut, the entrepreneur is raking in so much cash that the boilerplate person would take a difficult time comprehending his true wealth. As a bite-sized case, Yahoo has calculated that in 2021 alone, in very rough and approximate terms, Bezos earned nearly $three,715 ... per 2nd.

Information technology's easy to think that someone who's sitting on such a massive mountain of money didn't become the best seat at the billionaires' table by being polite and playing prissy. In Bezos' case, such suspicions may very well exist correct. Many of his business practices and personal traits show a man who knows what he wants, and is not afraid to be hard on his opponentsand allies to achieve his goals. In that location are many stories of his less than savory antics, and when they're compiled, the dark truth of the richest man in the world emerges. Here'due south what Jeff Bezos is really like.

Jeff Bezos is a massive command freak

Getty Images

When people discuss Jeff Bezos, a recurring theme seems to be his insistence on belongings all the strings he tin attain. Bezos stepped downward as Amazon CEO in July 2021, just his former employees and critics take had things to say almost his tenure. In an interview with CBS News, Noel Tichy from the University of Michigan described Bezos every bit a "control freak" and Amazon as a "one-human being show." Business Insider tells the story of former Amazon engineer Steve Yegge, who went even further by saying the billionaire made "ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies." Bezos seems to be fairly unapologetic about this and was known to tell his employees that they should pay him to work at Amazon.

Yegge did acknowledge that Bezos' tendency to micromanage was overshadowed by the fact that he'south extremely smart and often far alee of his time. However, that didn't make things whatever easier for his employees. In 2002, the CEO suddenly demanded that all his technology teams must rebuild their systems from the ground up to build Amazon into a platform where every system was compatible and that outside developers could easily access. He too promised to fire every single person who couldn't pull off this massive undertaking.

​He brutally insulted his employees

Getty Images

To say Jeff Bezos was not the world's near softly-spoken boss is like saying that the lemon is not the sweetest fruit. In his volume, "The Everything Store,"author Brad Stone describes Bezos' trend to go ballistic when an employee didn't encounter his standards (via Business Insider). The billionaire had an array of hyperbolic and harsh insults he spewed at the unfortunate targets of his ire with such anger that a blood vessel bulged on his head. Amazon veterans take actually nerveless a greatest hits listing of Bezos' outbursts, which range from "Why are y'all wasting my life?" and "I'm sad, did I have my stupid pills today?" to labeling his target incompetent or part of the "B-team."

Some of these attacks were more or less understandable, such as when someone tried to blatantly barefaced their fashion through a situation or attempted to take credit for someone else'due south work. However, an Amazon employee could get chewed out for any number of reasons, including internal politics, "frailty in the heat of the battle," or just non having all the right answers direct away.

He'due south not interested in charity

Getty Images

For a man who the The Atlanticestimates would take to spend $28 million a day in 2018 simply to avoid getting richer, Jeff Bezos appears to have a strange human relationship with clemency. BGR describes how he took to Twitter in 2017 to inquire people what he should practice to be a philanthropist. And so, in a 2018 interview with Mathias Döphner, he stated that the only mode he tin can encounter to use his wealth is to spend it on his space company, Blue Origin. Out of the 4 richest Americans (Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Marking Zuckerberg), AOL says Bezos is the most elusive almost charity, despite being No. 1. He's likewise the merely one of the iv who hasn't signed the Giving Pledge — the commitment many of the world'south wealthiest people make to use the majority of their resource for practiced causes.

In all fairness, Bezos has made some charitable donations over the years. In 2020, CBS News reports he launched the Bezos Earth Fund to help fight climate change with a $10 billion gift and gave $100 one thousand thousand to the Feeding America COVID-19 Response Fund.

In 2018, he started the Solar day 1 Fund, which aims to devote $2 billion to address homelessness and education issues. However, Vox points out that the initiative is uncharacteristically vague and potentially ineffective for a Bezos effort, and Recode even wondered whether the world's richest person would be so generous if he wasn't nether such intense scrutiny. Even if the Solar day One Fund is ultimately successful in whatsoever its mission is, it'southward still peanuts compared to the $41.3 billion that the significantly less wealthy Neb Gates gave in charitable donations between 2000 and 2016.

He's a self-admitted tax dodger

Getty Images

Few people similar paying taxes, but fifty-fifty fewer tin can compare to Jeff Bezos in how frankly he speaks well-nigh his hard work to dodge them. According to Fortune, Bezos famously decided to found Amazon in Washington land instead of the hot tech hub of California and was perfectly happy to admit that he did it to dodge California's sales taxes. At one point, Bezos fifty-fifty considered planting Amazon on a Native American reservation in California, where it would have been exempt from state sales tax. This was simply the offset of Amazon's natural aversion to tax-paying. For the next xx years, the company carefully avoided sales taxes in the majority of other states, too. This gave it a price advantage over traditional volume retailers and helped it to establish a strong foothold in east-commerce.

As The Atlantic points out, Amazon'southward attitude toward taxes hasn't exactly changed through the years. As a massive economic player, information technology's able to parlay governments and states for billions and billions of tax deductions. In 2017, the company made $v.6 billion in pure turn a profit, and in 2018 CNBC reported a profit of $xi billion — yet Amazon paid no federal income taxes any. Equally a major shareholder, this policy directly benefited Bezos — who naturally commanded a fairly small salary, meaning about all of his income was bailiwick to majuscule gains taxes, which maxed out at just twenty% instead of the 37% acme rate on regular income.

His weird mental attitude toward danger

Getty Images

"And then Jeff Bezos is sitting in a helicopter with an chaser, a cowboy and a pilot" sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but in 2003, this scenario actually happened. According to Business Insider, Bezos was in West Texas to purchase some land for his Blue Origin rocket company. He was advised to survey on horseback only preferred to make things quick by using a helicopter instead. And then Bezos, his attorney, and a cowboy guide stepped in an Aérospatiale Gazelle chopper, piloted by Charles "Cheater" Bella.

Once they landed at the outset location, the guide grew worried almost gusty winds and wanted to leave while it was calm. Even so, Bezos took his fourth dimension earlier they moved to the next spot. What happened next was described past the National Transportation Safety Lath as "an uncontrolled descent" that impacted the terrain. In reality, the accident was a bit wilder: A gust of wind made Bella lose control of the helicopter, which clipped the basis and violently rolled into a nearby creek, tail and rotor blades snapping off during the tumble. Fortunately, no one died.

Bezos' reaction to the life-threatening accident that actually broke his chaser's vertebrae was ... a i-liner and a loud laugh. He just commented that they should take used horses subsequently all, and started laughing and so difficult that it boomed through the entire canyon.

HQ2 was one big circus

Getty Images

In belatedly 2017, Amazon announced that it wanted to pick a location for its new "HQ2" headquarters and began graciously accepting offers from cities all over the The states. Many of the offers were ridiculously generous, basically a competition to see who could requite away enough freebies to lure Amazon in. MacLean'south reported that many jumped at the chance to get the corporate juggernaut in their lawn. Chicago offered to direct $1.32 billion of the income taxes paid by Amazon workers back to the visitor itself. Newark's bid included over $7 billion in assorted tax benefits. Maryland'due south packet of incentives and revenue enhancement exemptions totaled $viii.5 billion, and they fifty-fifty named their programme "Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland's Economy" but to shoehorn in the acronym PRIME.

New York and Virginia won the bidding war, just according to In These Times, everyone involved actually lost, saying that neither location were likely to bring the promised 50,000 jobs and $v billion in investment in the region. In fact, in 2019, Amazon halted their New York plans due to local opposition, CNBC reports. And, while plans are all the same underway in Virginia, Amazon has estimated only effectually 25,000 new jobs over the next decade for the new headquarters.

The HQ2 process also gave Amazon admission to a massive enshroud of non-public financial and infrastructural information on the whopping 238 cities that submitted their bids over the course of the competition, giving them massive leverage for future operations, which is possibly why Amazon orchestrated the whole behest state of war in the offset place.

Jeff Bezos attacked book publishers similar "sickly gazelles"

Getty Images

When Amazon was starting out, many small-scale publishers welcomed this new way of distribution with open arms. Unfortunately, they didn't quite realize what they were signing up for. "The Everything Shop"reveals that Jeff Bezos doesn't think too highly of the publishing business concern and views the industry every bit a helpless animal just waiting for a predator (via Business organization Insider). When the smaller publishers started becoming more than and more dependent on Amazon for sales, the company suddenly started playing hardball, demanding more favorable contract terms in means that "The Everything Store"calls direct-upwards sadistic. This treatment was courtesy of the former CEO himself, as Bezos had ordered his employees to "arroyo these small publishers the fashion a chetah would pursue a sickly gazelle."

As a result of this mandate, some Amazon executives took such sadistic pleasance in abusing publishers that the company'southward lawyers started feeling a piddling worried most the situation. Eventually, they stepped in and demanded that Amazon rename its publisher-abusing business organization program from the Gazelle Project (yes, that was its actual name) to the more corporate-friendly Small-scale Publishers Negotiation Program. When your lawyers have to at-home you down, yous know you've maybe gone too far.

​​He fabricated his employees piece of work against each other

Getty Images

Existence unpleasant to your underlings is rarely considered an effective management tool, but Jeff Bezos really harnessed information technology and took things to the next level past encouraging his workers to be unpleasant to each other. According to the New York Times, Bezos and Amazon threw the concept of workplace harmony to the air current. Instead, employees were actively encouraged to eviscerate each others' ideas in meetings, and the company's internal phone directory even features instructions on how to give secret feedback well-nigh their coworkers to their bosses. The organization is called the Anytime Feedback Tool, and using it to snitch on a fellow worker is so unproblematic that it even provides sample texts, such as, "I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining almost modest tasks." Multiple employees say the tool was often used to sabotage colleagues, and some fifty-fifty devised smear campaigns where an unpopular coworker was buried with multiple bad reviews.

One former Amazon HR director chosen this approach "purposeful Darwinism," and it'southward ... not exactly the most employee-friendly management method. Amazon is a highly stressful workplace even without having to constantly fear that someone'due south decided to randomly report you to the Thought Law.

Jeff Bezos maintained a ruthless corporate culture

Getty Images

To shape Amazon according to his vision, Jeff Bezos created the Leadership Principles. Amongst other things, these 14 rules required workers to obsess over customers, achieve more with less, and make speedy decisions while maintaining "relentlessly high standards." If that sounds unrealistic, many employees take agreed. The New York Times describes how workers toiled over projects without sleeping for four days in a row, paid freelancers in India to help them go along up with data entry, and spent vacations at Starbucks using the free Wi-Fi to become work washed. This sort of ruthless corporate culture tin pb to health issues, which the company has been less than sympathetic near. Amazon has reportedly cast aside workers who can't perform to the company's borderline impossible expectations, regardless of the reason behind their "incompetence." Fifty-fifty workers who have suffered cancer, miscarriages, or other life-altering personal crises can be evaluated unfairly or "managed out."

The visitor even gave an insanely difficult fourth dimension to the people who could actually cope with the force per unit area. Ex-employee Chris Brucia tells a story about a particularly punishing operation review in 2012. His boss eviscerated him with a xxx-minute lecture on all his faults and every goal he had failed to run into. Only when Brucia was sure his Amazon career was at an end, his boss hugged him and informed him that he was, in fact, existence promoted. Cheers for the pep talk?

His endeavors make him seem like a supervillain

Getty Images

Jeff Bezos was a mighty CEO and is a noted tech industry ability player, but as Market Watch describes, there's also a whole lot about him that'south ripe for comparison with a comic book supervillain. Apart from having the same hairstyle as Lex Luthor and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, he has money to burn and the "control of a globally influential media institution." His penchant for developing a armada for space exploration is some other tick on the checklist, as is one of his stranger vanity projects — a 500-pes-tall, thermally powered "10,000-year clock" that he's embedding in a mount for reasons that remain his own. Bezos even has the melodramatic express joy to go with the classic villain image: As Inc. points out, the billionaire is known for his loud, honking laughter.

Really, all Bezos needs at this point is access to a giant robot he tin can pilot ... which, incidentally, he admittedly has.

His divorce and alleged sexting scandal

Getty Images

On January 9, 2019, Jeff Bezos appear on Twitter that he and his married woman of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, were divorcing. According to USA Today, an extramarital affair may have something to do with the divorce, as multiple tabloids claimed Bezos had developed a relationship with former Television set anchor Lauren Sanchez. Some even released private photos and letters in which Bezos was said to flaunt his strangely robotic sexting skills: "I dearest y'all, alive girl," he allegedly wrote to Sanchez. "I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon."

Bezos' divorce announcement strongly indicated that the separation was amicable and the two exes will remain friends. In July 2019, a settlement was reached, with MacKenzie receiving $38 billion. Over the next 2 years, she donated billions to charities beyond a diverseness of sectors — in stark comparison to her ex-married man's record of charitable giving. In 2021, MacKenzie married scientific discipline teacher Dan Jewett, reports Forbes. In a argument, Jeff Bezos wished the newlyweds well, saying "Dan is such a keen guy."

​Amazon warehouses are "like prisons"

Getty Images

The warehouse is rarely the most luxurious place of employment in any company, but things are really bad when people are peeing in water bottles and comparing the work surroundings to prison. Life in an Amazon warehouse (or "fulfillment center," every bit the company calls them) involves both of those things, and many more. In 2016, author James Bloodworth went hugger-mugger in an Amazon warehouse to research for a book and soon discovered that the job was and then hectic that he didn't have enough time to consume or drink properly. The temper reminded him of prison, and the airport-manner security checks and oppressive, point-based management added to the image. Some of the employees even peed in bottles and left them on the shelves because the performance targets were so loftier that they didn't accept fourth dimension to take a bathroom break.

While Amazon denied many of Bloodworth's claims and has since stopped using the employment bureau that hired him due to its questionable policies, other warehouse workers have repeated the writer's claims. According to multiple reports by Wired, Business Insider, the Guardian, The New York Times, and Newsweek, warehouse employees even so urinate in bottles and even trash cans due to fourth dimension constraints. The workers also say that many of the problems Bloodworth reported persist: The targets are too high, surveillance is constant, the pay is inadequate, and workplace injuries are depressingly common.

eubanksexpristirts.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.grunge.com/143621/the-dark-truth-about-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/

Share this post