Jeff Bezos: Get big fast

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Hello and welcome to Good, Bad, Billionaire from BBC Sounds. In this podcast, we'll be finding out how the richest people on our planet got so rich. And then we'll be judging them. Are they good, bad or just another billionaire? I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor. And I'm Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, podcaster and author.

Each episode, we're going to pick a billionaire who we find fascinating and cover their journey to the top. So how is this programme going to work? First, we're going to tell the story of how each billionaire went from zero to a million. And then we'll go from a million to a billion. and beyond, well beyond in some cases. In some cases. And what makes you interested in billionaires?

The thing is, if you talk about a billionaire, you're really talking about someone who is probably about as important and influential as a politician or an elected head of state, but they are completely unaccountable to everyone but their shareholders. What interests me about them is the fact that they exist at all.

I mean, it tells us something about how the world works, that 81 billionaires, for example, have as much wealth as the poorest four and a half billion people on the planet Earth. Now, the fact that that is true tells us something. I mean, is it grotesque? that that's the case? Or is it a byproduct of really useful innovation which changes the world in which we live? I mean, I have to say I'm leaning more towards grotesque, but...

I am willing to approach this with an open mind. And I want this podcast to change the way I feel about billionaires, maybe. In this pond of big fish that we'll be fishing in, we are going to hook a whale for our first billionaire, the founder of a company that has changed the way the world buys things.

Amazon for a period, the very richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. Everything about this story is big. There's some wild facts here. Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world from 2017 to 2021. He's now third, which is, you know, nothing to say.

Yeah, and their wealth can fluctuate a great deal. There's one day when he lost $80 billion in a couple of weeks. And that is more than some of our billionaires have accumulated in their entire life. He's also the world's first centi-billionaire. What is that exactly? I think that means...

first person to hit $100 billion in net worth. And he also was the first person to hit $200. He's come off the boil a bit. I think he's down to about $140 at the moment. He'll get by. When you've got that kind of money, the only way you can make a dent in it is by going into space. So he started his own rocket company.

Classic Bond villain behaviour. Spent $5 billion on the Blue Origin space programme. And the rocket stuff makes sense. He's a mad Star Trek fan, so that shows you where his heart lies. He also, for the Trekkies out there, owns...

Captain John Luke Picard's uniform from Star Trek The Next Generation. So, you know, still holding on to those geeky roots slightly. Of course, he had one of the other great stats. He had the most expensive divorce in history. He had to give his ex-wife $38 billion by miles.

the biggest divorce settlement. So in one fell swoop, she became one of the world's billionaires too, which is not bad going. She would have been probably at least in the top 100, which is not bad going, as you say. He also, of course, has collected a few things along the way. The Washington Post, for example.

He also owns Whole Foods Market, which is a major US supermarket with some chains in the UK as well. Yeah, and he spent a billion dollars on the most expensive TV show ever. That was The Lord of the Rings. In fact, Amazon Prime, which is another part of the business we'll talk about,

for making TV shows and films is $8 billion a year. That is more than the budget of the entire BBC. Right. For context, I think the BBC's annual budget last year was around $3 billion. Yeah. So that, I mean, that kind of puts it all into perspective.

perspective let's go and trace it all the way back let's start on how he goes from zero to his first million he was a bright kid He was. He was something of a child prodigy, actually. So he was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Breaking Bad fans. That's where Breaking Bad is set. And he was originally called Jeff Jorgensen. Yes, his parents were teenagers. His mother was still in high school.

high school when he was born he said believe me this was a time when that was not a cool thing and I read that his birth father was a professional unicycle hockey player and which is by the way actually a real sport I had to look it up it's kind of like polo but with Unicycles instead of horses. Anyway, it was briefly popular in Albuquerque, but...

Crucially, the unicycle hockey player dad was not around for long. Big in Albuquerque, completely forgotten elsewhere. So he then took the name of his stepfather. Yes, his dad was out of the picture and he got adopted by the new guy in his mum's life.

at the age of, I think, around three. And this was also around the same time he starts exhibiting real prodigy behaviour. So at three, he famously disassembles his own crib with a screwdriver because he wants to sleep on a bed like a grown-up. I mean, God bless his mother. mother for letting him anywhere near a screwdriver i'm not sure i would let a toddler near one but you know this is bezos we're talking about and his first business when he was a teenager he sets up a summer camp

Because he hates working at McDonald's so much and reckons he can make more money going at it on his own. Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about some of the billionaires we're going to be covering in this series. They showed an entrepreneurial ability, desire to make a buck.

Pretty early in life. And one of the interesting things I read about Bezos as a teenager was from his high school girlfriend. And, you know, she says Jeff always wanted to make a lot of money, but it wasn't about money itself. It's about what he was going to do. do with the money about changing the future. So, you know, immediately you get the sense that, you know, money is important to Bezos.

It's not everything. It's kind of what he wants to do with it. Yeah, I saw him say that you can either have a job, you can have a career, or you can have a calling. And if you get a calling, then you've hit the jackpot because that's the real deal and that's the kind of thing that motivates you. But let's go back. So he graduates high school, does pretty well.

He ends up going to Princeton and he graduates with highest honours in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986. He does what lots of Ivy League graduates, Ivy League, the top universities in America, Princeton's one of them, and he heads to Wall Street.

Yes. In his Wall Street, he wasn't a dealmaker in those days. He was more of a kind of software kind of person designing systems. And he went to work for this company called D.E. Shaw, which is sort of like a private equity fund, but very focused on technology. And D.E. Shaw & Co. is also where he ends up meeting his first wife, Mackenzie Tuttle, who also works at Shaw. And they marry six months later.

And that's, as we heard in that clip, he decides, you know what, I'm going off on my own. And he says, I'm going to go and sell books from my garage. Kind of a big deal in those days, I think, right? Because the internet was not... the internet as we know it now. People must have thought he was kind of crazy. Well, the guy he was working with, Dave Shaw, he went for a long walk with him in Central Park.

And he said, I'm going to sell books and I'm going to put it online. And Dave Shaw apparently said, that sounds like a really good idea. It would be an even better idea for someone who didn't have a great paying job right now. But he was determined. He's going to sell books. on the internet. The thing that he realised is that the internet was growing at such a speed. The internet grew 2,300% in terms of traffic in one year from 93 to 94 and he said things just don't grow that fast.

he sets up Amazon. Not the first name for the company. The first name for the company was Kadabra. which sounds a little bit too much like cadaver, to be honest. Then he mistakenly thought that Amazon was the longest river in the world. It is, in fact, the Nile for all the river geeks out there. But nevertheless, it's quite a good analogy as a stream through which you can...

push things. And that was kind of what the idea was. The internet was going to be this flow through which you could sell stuff, services, books, etc. Everything. Well, everything, which is why some people call Amazon to this day the everything store.

and he moves to seattle which is kind of an interesting choice right there's something in there about why he picked seattle specifically so seattle two good reasons one it's on the pacific northwest not a million miles away from palo alto california the cradle of the

technology industry. And secondly, it's got a small population, which means you don't pay that much sales tax because not that many of Amazon's customers would be from the state in which he would have to pay tax. Thinking about tax right from the beginning. Yeah. So you can already tell his mind is whirring, right?

of the long-term plan of you know how can we save on things how can we not cut corners but how can we kind of make sure we're not spending more money than we need to be and he invests what ten thousand dollars of his own money and has loans from people he knows, including $100,000 from his parents. And he sets up Amazon with a bang in 1995. And he even has this fun idea of having a bell ring every time the servers record a sale.

A few weeks in, they have to turn it off because the bell just keeps going. It sure does, because he's selling books at 40% below their list price. He's buying them wholesale at 50% below the list price that you'd pay in the store, and he's selling them for 40%. making a little bit of money. But he is really starting from the bottom because right at the very start, he, Bezos himself, is packing the parcels and driving them down to the post office. I mean, I doubt he does that.

himself nowadays. But the wholesaler who was supplying Amazon at the time would only accept orders for 10 books or more. But... Obviously, Amazon was still starting up, so they didn't have the orders to fulfill. So they figured out this little trick. They'd order the one book they wanted and nine copies of a book they knew did not exist and was out of stock. So their supplier would send the one book they needed.

Clever. I remember, you know, they say that you never forget your first time. Yeah. I remember the first time that I ordered a book. I was living on an island in the middle of the Atlantic and I'd heard of Amazon and this book arrived through the post. It was Ben Ockrey's The Famished Road. And I couldn't believe that this company from Seattle had managed to get a book all the way to this island. So I thought that was pretty impressive. OK, because at the time, how did you...

I mean, this sounds crazy, but how did you buy books? Did you have to go into a bookshop or put out a kind of mail order through the post? There were mail order catalogues, but mainly in the US it was dominated by Barnes & Noble and Borders. You'd see those huge stores.

in most major cities. That was still the way you did it. But of course, what he realised, and the genius of it was, is that there were millions of books in print and you couldn't put them all in one store. And so it was an ideal way. medium for doing it i don't think books was ever going to be the end of this but it was a perfect application of the internet to change the way people shop for certain things right but it also doesn't make money straight away right i mean sending books to

Guys like you in the Atlantic is not going to make them loads of cash in the first year. And this is the crucial thing about Amazon. It doesn't actually make a quarterly profit for nearly 10 years from when it started. Because every single time they got any revenue, they would really... invested the motto of the company eventually was get big fast so everything about it was about trying to reach scale and that is the secret to why to this day they don't actually pay very much tax because

every bit of profit they make, they reinvest it and you don't have to pay tax if you put the money back into the business. Right. But OK, but here's what I don't understand about Amazon making a loss for so long. How does it survive as a company? Because shareholders believe the story that one day, once they've got a big enough market share, they'll be able to turn up the volume on their margins and their profits. was kind of that

charismatic visionary who could convince people, right? Because it sounds like from reading about what Amazon is like and what working at Amazon is like, there's a real kind of workplace culture that comes from the very top. And not always a good one, as we'll get on to later.

Relations with his own employees haven't always been that harmonious. But at this time, Bezos is really out there selling Amazon. And there's a crucial interview he does, which really boosts the company's profile. Importantly, of course, their sales. Yes. So it's a 1996 interview on the... The front page of the Wall Street Journal headlined, How a Wall Street whiz finds niche selling books on the internet. And that sees Amazon sales literally double.

overnight so sales are growing and then a very important sale which is selling the company itself in what they call an IPO that stands for initial public offering and that's when you ask a bunch of people investors the public

to basically buy shares in your company. You sell a small portion of it, they give you the money, and they own a piece of the company. And he has the Amazon IPO in 1997. So all the people who initially invested in his company, like his parents, are now... millionaires right that's right and including jeff so there we are we've gone from zero he is officially on paper a multi-millionaire in 1997

So 1997, it gets the big IPO. Jeff becomes a millionaire, a multimillionaire. A multimillionaire. In one fell swoop. So how does he then go from millions to a billion? Remarkably quickly. In fact, I can't think of anyone who's ever gone more quickly from one million to a billion. It took him a year.

Again, that is an example of just the hysteria that was going on. We're right in the middle of the dot-com boom. Now, I remember working in finance around that time, and it's hard to describe just the kind of hysteria there was.

Anyone who had an idea on the internet could raise money. You had your postman telling you which technology companies to buy. It was crazy. Anything remotely connected to the internet, people wanted to throw money at it. And this was that period. Right. So it was basically the new gold rush.

It was totally like a gold rush. It kind of makes me almost come out in a sweat just remembering it because I remember people would be on the phone, oh, buy Puma Technologies, oh, buy this, buy that. There was ads for stockbroking on every channel in America. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

exactly like a gold rush. And the valuations of these companies went through the roof. The thing about Amazon was there was actually a proper business behind it. Right. And would you say that was relatively rare for...

Businesses in the dot-com boom? Not all of them stood up to much scrutiny, but Amazon did have a proper business. And so if you had a company that was connected with the internet and had a real business like Amazon did, then people would bite your hand off. They could see that Amazon sales were accelerated.

operating incredibly quickly people were paying up for that kind of growth so the stock price shoots up in one day it went up 19 on that day alone his net worth what he's worth went up 900 million dollars So almost a billion dollars in a day. I mean, you really could not make those figures up. But that is just one thing that I just do not understand. Amazon's losing money, right? It doesn't post a quarterly profit until the 2000s.

How can this guy be worth millions and then a billion if his company is just losing money throughout this whole period? It's all about the value of the shares he's got in the company. And when it comes to... investing investors are quite prepared to see losses if they see top line what they call top line sales growth they're just saying what they're doing is they're growing their sales their revenues increasing

Profits will come in time, but you're basically gaining market share all the time. And that's what Wall Street absolutely loves. It's a story where the top line of sales is growing exponentially, which is what's happening with Amazon. That makes their shares worth a lot of money.

His personal fortune is growing, even if the company on paper is actually losing money. Because he actually owns quite a lot of those shares. Yeah, he's the company's biggest shareholder. So as the value of the company goes up, his personal fortune goes up. And when you say market share, what?

Actually, do you mean by that? Well, it's for example, you know, think about the supermarket sector here in the UK. You've got Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, others. Each of them have a certain market share. How much money of the grocery market does each one of them have?

them have now back at this time people like barnes and noble traditional bookstore borders big us bookstore they would be the biggest sellers but what people are noticing is that amazon's market share is growing really quickly it's gobbling up this market out of incredible speed. And is that because the market is just confined, so the market can't expand anymore? The pie can't get bigger, so to speak.

Well, the pie can get bigger for certain things. For example, the personal computer market. In the early days, not that many people have personal computers. Back in the sort of 1980s, very few people had them. So you would have IBM with enormous market. share of quite a small pie through the 80s and 90s the size of the pie grows as more people are buying computers so the market itself is growing in books

Probably a finite market. You're not going to get lots of people suddenly reading books who hadn't before. So Amazon is eating their lunch, basically, eating into their market share. Because there's only so many books you can put in a Borders or a Barnes & Noble store. They've got every book. available in humanity and it's all online so they've got a greater choice they can deliver it to your door and it's cheaper so who doesn't want things cheaper

faster and more convenient. No one. We've gotten used to that these days. Amazon was changing the world, though, back in those days. Wow. And it's really changing our mentality as well, right? Because now we walk into a bookstore and we say, why don't you have this book? I'll just get it on Amazon. I know a lot of people try to resist.

urge to sort of they say i want to preserve my independent bookshop but in the end they go i can't i can't help it i'm just going to have to do it because they've got it it's cheaper and it'll arrive tomorrow

Or sometimes today. And crucially, in 1998, Amazon expands beyond just books. So you talk about the market share for books being, you know... relatively constrained. But now it starts selling CDs and videos and DVDs. It even buys IMDb, which is the kind of Hollywood standard.

for Wikipedia, kind of. That's right. It's kind of like the Bible of the movie industry. So we know perhaps that he's thinking about TV and movies and entertainment. He realises these are big growth categories. And in the same year, 1998, he also invests...

A quarter of a million in a new company that not many people have heard of called Google, which will also make him another billion by 2004. I remember in 1998, there was a guy who came into the office I was working in and he opened this thing on his computer called Google. I said,

what is Google? And he looked at me as if I was crazy from me saying, what the hell is Google? It's now a verb. Not only is he building a multi-billion pound company himself, he's also got a good eye for another one. And we'll probably get onto Google later in this series. And Amazon is now beginning to...

earn its tagline of the everything store, right? Because it adds home improvement products, it's adding software, it's adding video games, adding gift items. It's not just about books anymore. It's basically become the global version of the corner store where you can get literally

anything you want. Yeah, exactly. Books was never going to be the extent of his ambition. He realised that once he'd proved that it works, that the delivery mechanism worked, that you could have more stock, that you had more choice, more convenience, once he'd established proof of concept, as they say in business terms, he could send all these other products down the river, the Amazon River.

And the end of the 1990s, the end of the millennium, is crowned with him becoming Time magazine's Man of the Year. In many ways, he was the poster child for the internet and the dot-com boom. So you talk about the dot-com hysteria and what it was like to kind of... be there at the time but obviously as we all know it didn't

stick around for the longest time, right? There was a huge crash. There was. The dot-com crash at the end of the 1990s. And Amazon was not immune to that. In fact, its share price fell almost 90% in that year from December 1999 to December 2000. 2000.

Luckily for Amazon, because a lot of companies got wiped out by that. Hundreds of companies just disappeared. But luckily for Amazon, Ruth Porat, who worked at an investment bank called Morgan Stanley. By the way, she's now the chief financial officer at Google's parents.

company alphabet so she's stuck around she had advised them to sell some shares some securities in europe and so they had this cushion of several hundred million dollars and it's quite possible and that and they did that a month month before the crash it's quite possible that they hadn't had that cushion amazon wouldn't be with us today wow so it could have almost been life-threatening for them but they through stroke of luck yeah so they survived the dot com

crash and actually post their first quarterly profit of five million dollars in 2002 so eight years after setting up they post their first quarterly profit quite a journey but i just wondering whilst he's making all that money

What's it like to work for Jeff Bezos? He's... Well, he's tight. He's very, very tight or thrifty, if you want to use the complimentary verb for it. So, you know, in the dotcom boom, everyone's kind of throwing perks at people. You get, you know, free kind of massages and things. The food perks at Amazon consist.

of coffee and bananas and when Amazon moves to a new office Bezos furnishes them with cheap desks made of wooden doors and the entire idea is that Amazon is like frugal on behalf of its customers so that's why it kind of Grimps on everything else. You know, it's all about the customer first. Bezos has been relentless about focusing on the customer. But it also means that as a boss, he's also incredibly tough at people. And he would sometimes be quite abrasive, quite confrontational.

Yes. So, you know, there are stories of him sending emails where he's screaming at workers. You know, there are stories of workers in Amazon warehouses being put under relentless pressure to hit numbers. There have been quite a few cases where Amazon...

Workers have said, you know, I've got colleagues who have had workplace injuries or I've been injured myself scrambling up and down these ladders to try and hit those targets to pack the Amazon parcels. And, you know, that kind of pressure really comes from the top, I think.

they're trying to give an image that they're driving costs down they're batting for the customer the customer comes first we're straining every sinew to get you the best price and the most convenience but a lot of people buckle under that kind of pressure some people even peeing in bottles because they weren't allowed to get the loo yeah exactly in fact there's

I think currently now a suit against Amazon from Amazon drivers who say that they violated workplace legislation. You know, it kind of adds up to quite a bleak company culture. Which is why they've had so many run-ins with the unions. In fact, there was a huge battle in some of the states. in the U.S.

denied union recognition. I think there's been some progress on that. But that gives you an idea that Amazon is not keen on having their workers organised or unionised. Yeah. And it even hires law firms that specialise in fighting unions and kind of union. So all in all, you know, that kind of workplace culture, I mean...

It doesn't come from anywhere, right? It comes from a kind of relentless focus on hitting targets, on growth at any cost. And you can see from the very early days of Amazon that that comes from Jeff Bezos himself. Which is kind of galling if you're one of those people who feeling that they're working under very difficult...

conditions when the person you're working from who's setting that tone is becoming richer and richer and richer maybe it's something about the human touch that amazon has always lacked and i think if you read interviews of people who've worked with jess bezos before you know people

worked in his factories and warehouses you know they will kind of mention that bezos as a person sort of almost lacks a bit of an empathetic human touch because he's so focused on juicing those margins he wants to make it as cheap as possible for the customer of course that was also the genie

if you like you can use that word or the trick behind Amazon Prime if you become an Amazon Prime member you get a bunch of stuff for free you get tv movies prime day sales you get uh free delivery on a bunch of things so you once you've kind of given in to the amazon thing once you're an amazon prime member then that

You're locked in. And that's, you know, you talk about the Amazonification of everything. I mean, that's basically the Amazonification of your entire life, right? You could get food there. You get entertainment there. You could get everyday consumer goods. It kind of sets. you up for an amazon home and as that money came in again the jeff bezos mantra was reinvest reinvest so we start seeing things like kindles you remember those that the fire tablets you've got alexa you've got echo

that smart speaker, you've got film, you've got television, you've got all sorts of things. But the big one, actually, was something called Amazon Web Services. This is the plumbing behind what we call the cloud, cloud computing. In fact, if you're listening to this, you probably downloaded it from an Amazon service.

I know the BBC uses them like millions of other businesses. They're the biggest company in the cloud computing space. And in fact, that is the most profitable bit of Amazon. Billions and billions and billions come from that business. And I think that's one of the really smart things about Bezos. is that he doesn't stay in his lane. When he sees an opportunity, he doesn't stop himself from going after it, even though there's not a lot to connect cloud computing to a retail store that flogs.

discount books and cds you know he just sees something and goes for it and in that sense it's kind of admirable so all of these businesses most of them making tons of money

Finally, Forbes names Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person and the first human being ever to be worth $100 billion. $100 billion, aka a centi-billionaire. And I think this is also the time his lifestyle also changes, right? So he starts...

Appearing on TV at the Oscars, I heard that, you know, he threw a party with Matt Damon and bought a house in Beverly Hills. This is around the time he also gets really, really hench. It's very amusing. Hench? What's that? Hench is when you get... Oh, OK. Hench is when you get...

Very, very muscly. When you get stacked, you get jacked. And this is exactly what Jeff Bezos becomes. He gets jacked. If you see him, he's got the ball. He looks a bit like, you know, in Austin Powers, Mini Me. You know that one? He looks like a bigger version of that.

in many ways which is not a bad comparison because he behaves like that and this is when he starts looking at the rockets he's wearing the flight jackets he's got the shades on the black polo necks and you know the kind of aviator sunglasses he's going full Bond villain at this point yeah he really really is and I think that's kind of what's given him this popular kind of portrayal in the media as well you know it's just you look at pictures of him now compared to

when he was on Time Magazine's front cover, he looks like a different person. It does. And he's also got some lavish spending habits. He's got the obligatory Gulfstream jet. He buys up a bunch of apartments in Manhattan, knocks them all together to have this vast place.

He's got a ranch with 100,000 acres, which becomes the home of his rocket company. We are on full tilt, pedal to the metal in terms of expenditure here. So around the time Bezos becomes a kind of super villain figure, one of the things that people always love to hear...

him over the head with is the idea of tax. And notoriously, Amazon doesn't pay that much tax, which doesn't seem to make sense to me because, you know, he's a billionaire, right? And the company's making money now. There's a couple of ways that Amazon can minimise tax.

is to reinvest the profits it makes. And the tax rules allow you to basically offset investments against the profits you make. So your profits come down because it's profits minus investment. So your profits are lower and therefore the tax you pay is lower.

The second one is, like a lot of other technology companies, they are masters of using low tax jurisdictions to keep their tax bill down. So, for example, most of the profits that are made here in the UK, the sales that are made in the UK, are actually booked. in Luxembourg, which has an almost zero tax rate. Other companies do this as well. And there's been this worldwide...

campaign to try and get these internet companies to pay more taxes. Basically, as far as people like Apple and Amazon and others are concerned, these profits live in the equivalent of outer space no one knows quite how to get get their hands on because they're basically swapped between offshore tax jurisdictions where taxes are very low one of the reasons why you say they have this huge global campaign to try and introduce a

minimum corporate tax rate around the world. It hasn't happened yet, but there are moves afoot for countries to get their hands on the billions these companies are making. And when you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right? Because if your company is sort of strangling the local highest and putting corner shops out of business. Why can't you at least tax them? Yeah, exactly right. So we've come a long way. And so I think it's time to judge Bezos. OK, let's do it.

So the entire point of this podcast is we want to figure out if billionaires have been good or bad for the world. Being a billionaire is just a morally neutral thing. So to do that, we've come up with a few categories like, you know, villainy, level of philanthropy, etc. And we're going to rank them out of 10 to try and figure out if the billionaire we're talking about is good, bad or...

Just plain rich. Yeah, this reminds me of Top Trumps, which is probably before your time. But we're going to go through these different categories and give them scores out of 10. So let's start with wealth.

I mean, he's pretty wealthy. He's up there at the very top. Well, he wasn't the richest man in the world for four years. I think we've got to give him... I mean, he's not the richest man in the world right now, so I was going to give him a 10. Maybe we'll give him a solid 9. Yeah, I feel like...

Because he once was the richest man in the world. Can we do half points? Nine and a half? Nine and a half. OK, let's do nine and a half. OK, he's definitely at the top of the tree there, isn't he? Rags to riches. How far have they travelled from birth to billionaire? I mean, it wasn't like...

Like he grew up in a shack in Albuquerque, right? He had a pretty middle class lifestyle. And also famously, his parents invested in his business. Yeah, if parents can put $100,000 into your business, you're not living on the streets, are you? Exactly. I think it's like modest. to mega rather than rags to riches yeah that is true so the distance he started out at is not quite you know a zero he did get very rich though so i'm going to say so i'm going to give him six okay

I think I'm going to give him a seven because, you know, being the world's first centibillionaire is a big journey from just being some kid from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's going to be gutted when he finds out these scores, I'm sure. He's not yet. Okay, so next is Villainy.

OK, well, I mean, I'm going to give this a 10. I don't think there's anyone out there who quite matches the Bond villain type, the mini me from Austin Powers, quite the way that Jeff Bezos does. The jacket, the shades, the rocket. Yeah. The union busting, the not paying of tax. Oh, there's that as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I kind of want to give us some wiggle room. I don't know. Maybe I'm going to give him another nine and a half. Maybe there's more villainous.

billionaire will meet do you think well it's kind of like it's the caricature which i think that he fits so and he's always created it in a way I mean, he hasn't killed anyone. Not directly. Maybe we'll be covering billionaires in this podcast who actually have. watch this space so I'm going to give him all right villainy I'll give him nine okay I'll give him I'll give him another nine and a half okay fine philanthropy

He's actually not done a lot has he? Not really. I mean if you look at what people like. Bill Gates have done. He's given away 40, 50 billion. Warren Buffett says he's going to give all his money away. There's a big movement. It's the thing about America is that people don't mind you getting filthy rich.

But there is an expectation that once you get to that top of the mind, you start giving it back. You start becoming a professional philanthropist. And I don't see that happening here. Famously, he also divorced his wife, Mackenzie, and she has then taken her billions and started...

becoming quite the philanthropist herself. So she's kind of shown him up. I think shown him up, you know, really has shown him up. Philanthropy, given how much money he's got, I'm going to give him a big fat zero. I'm going to give him a zero because he can do better. I mean, honestly, if you're listening to this...

Jeff. Sorry, mate, but come on. Chuck someone a tenner once in a while. Okay, so you get very poor marks there. Power, on the other hand. How much influence do they really have in the world? I would rank him... pretty highly in terms of in terms of when you think about what Amazon did to change people's mentality they made people want to shop online they made people want things same day delivery if you know next day delivery that's all an Amazon thing you know he hasn't

toppled government sure but he's changed people's psychology which i think is much trickier so i'm going to give him an A 10. A 10, because he has made us all very impatient, right? If something's not here now, we want to know why. And not only that, he's moaned down whole other industries with the Amazon juggernaut. There are dozens of companies who have gone bust.

because they can't compete with Amazon just the scale of that so I think he's changed the landscape not just of retail but the way we think about acquiring anything now so i think that that and also when he was actually in charge as well if he decided that he was going to dabble in this industry or that industry he could change the face for those industries and of course he also bought the washington post which is a not

inconsequential purchase and obviously had a real go at Donald Trump whilst he was in office. So he was wielding indirectly quite a lot of power there as well. Yeah, so I think a 10. Yeah, I think a 10, definitely. And what's our last category? Legacy. I mean, the world is a different place post-Amazon. It's funny. I remember needing to get something, you know.

maybe a mouse trap even. And I went onto Amazon immediately and tried to get one for the next day. And then I thought to myself, wait a second, I live 10 minutes around this corner from a hardware store. Why can't I just walk there? But the Amazon mentality has just changed people's minds.

to the extent where you just expect things to be faster on Amazon. And that's incredible. I used to have a real problem because my partner... buys everything on amazon and and it like we need some thing to moth spray yes classic amazon purchase classic amazon moth spray right nice and i said it's like two pounds 99 and i said we can't order this one little

of something and have someone come and deliver this to us that's nuts and she says listen he's got a truck full of stuff anyway he's coming down our way anyway it's not going to make it because part of me thought it was obscenely

involved procedure, having someone pick it off a shelf, put it in this, goes down the conveyor belt, comes off the end, puts in the van, he drives around and brings me my little can of moth stuff. And I said, surely that seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. But we've gotten used to it. Yeah, and that is the Amazon legacy. It's completely changed the way we shop. So I would give him a 10 for this. Okay. It's hard to imagine a company that's changed the way we shop.

behave as much or more than Amazon so I'm going to give it a 10 as well so when it comes to our final judgment is Bezos good bad or just wealthy. What do you think? I'm going to say mainly bad. Yeah. But I'm going to say that it's my fault that it's happened as well. Do you know what I mean? I don't mean my fault specifically. I mean, it's our fault. The power that it has, the way it's changed the world, the businesses it's destroyed.

We are the people who allowed that to happen because we are the ones who want things cheaper, faster, more convenient, more choice. All of those things are irresistible. So we are complicit in the success. of amazon so it's i would say mainly bad but i'm looking i'm holding up a mirror to myself right now i would say it's mainly bad and you make you make a good point as well bezos really bezos didn't invent our desire for cheap fast accessible shopping he just saw it and

catered to it relentlessly and exploited it and probably exploited quite a few people along the way to get to that desire but at the end of the day he was just serving what society wanted yeah that's so yeah we're all bad that's the conclusion we're all

bad and it made him very very rich so come back next week we're going to be talking about the wealthiest female musician in the world she's the youngest self-made female billionaire in america the 21st richest self-made woman in the world and she's done it all at the age of 35 yeah and hey she is

Bad girl Riri herself, Rihanna. Rihanna next week. Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire. This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward. James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production. If you like listening, tell a friend. Keeping your IT team sharp isn't optional. It's essential. CBT Nuggets delivers high quality IT training led by real world experts who know what teams actually need.

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