Who Is Jeff Bezos?
Who Is?
iHeartRadio + NowThis
4.1 • 803 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2020
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1993, Jeff Bezos noticed that use of something called “the web” was up 2300 percent. So, he moved to Seattle and started a company: Amazon. Nearly thirty years later, Bezos, the wealthiest human being on the planet, is on track to become humanity’s first trillionaire, and Amazon has grown into one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world. An exquisite, revenue-generating machine, from e-commerce to Amazon Web Services, or, AWS, Amazon is both marketplace and infrastructure for the contemporary economy. But Amazon’s dominance and Bezos’s immense wealth come at a cost: to workers, to small businesses, and to the health of competitive markets. On this episode of “Who Is?,” the story behind the package--and your Amazon Prime membership.
- Vanessa, an Amazon worker and organizer with DCH1 Amazonians United
- Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance
- Kshama Sawant, a Seattle City Councilwoman who has represented Seattle’s District 3 since 2014
- Andreas Weigend, a data scientist who previously served as Amazon’s chief scientist. He is the author of the book “Data for the People”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What does it take to build an empire? |
| 0:04.1 | Years ago, you had to have like spears and phalanxes. |
| 0:07.4 | It was a whole to do. |
| 0:08.9 | But what does it take in 2020? |
| 0:11.6 | Jeff Bezos has built an exquisite machine for consolidating power and ultimately consolidating wealth. |
| 0:19.5 | More and more, the economy is running through Amazon, |
| 0:22.9 | and every bit of it that moves through Amazon, there is a tax that's levied. And this is how Bezos |
| 0:28.6 | has become the richest man in the world. Yeah, richest man in the world. In 2020, he became |
| 0:35.4 | the first person to ever have $200 billion. I literally had to |
| 0:40.3 | rewrite this line because of how fast Bezos is amassing wealth. And if it continues to grow |
| 0:45.3 | at the same rate, he'll be a trillionaire by 2026. |
| 0:49.3 | Amazon, in just a few years, went from selling a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's fluid concepts and |
| 0:55.3 | creative analogies, computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought, to selling everything, |
| 1:01.3 | and owning the very infrastructure on which everything is sold. |
| 1:06.1 | Bezos's empire serves almost half of all internet purchases in the United States. |
| 1:11.4 | More people go to Amazon to begin their search for a product than Google. |
| 1:16.1 | And even if you don't knowingly use Amazon, you're almost definitely interacting with them. |
| 1:20.9 | They basically own the internet through Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which represents |
| 1:27.0 | half of all cloud computing, including for the CIA. |
| 1:31.3 | And it's all in the hands of one guy from Albuquerque. |
| 1:36.1 | So, who is Jeff Bezos? |
| 1:53.6 | I'm Sean Morrow and this is Who Is, the podcast from Now This, where we examine power by looking at those who have it. |
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