Early employees of Amazon still remember the day the company took away their aspirin.
It was late 1999. After years of heady excess, the internet boom was beginning to falter. Amazon, among the most celebrated of the dotcoms, was burdened with debt and spiraling losses. Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief impresario, had to impress Wall Street that he was serious about cutting costs.
But how? Amazon had never indulged employees with Silicon Valley perks like massages or sushi chefs. Just about the only thing that workers received free was aspirin. So the aspirin went.
The removal created a lot of muttering, but the cost-cutting -- including layoffs -- and promises of future profit helped Amazon escape the jaws of doom. Now, 14 years later, Bezos, 49, has become so rich and successful that he can surprise the world by buying The Washington Post for the equivalent of pocket change, which in his case is $250 million.
No one, apparently including Bezos himself, seems to know what he intends to do with that fabled newspaper. This is, after all, a man who once said the quality he most wanted in a wife was the ability to spring him from a third-world prison. He can probably be counted on to think unpredictably.
The aspirin take-away and similar incidents over the course of Bezos' career show a determination to do whatever is necessary to succeed and a fanatic attention to detail, even at the expense of appearing ridiculous. Also, he does not care about your headache.
"Jeff may be outwardly goofy, with that trademark laugh, but he's a very tough guy," said James Marcus, who was Amazon's employee No. 55. "If he goes even halfway through with his much-vaunted reinvention of journalism, there is no way he's not going to break some eggs."
Bezos is the sole founder, the public face, the largest shareholder and the visionary of Amazon.
"For many of us, creating Earth's biggest bookstore would have been enough," said Kerry Fried, employee No. 251. "Jeff's goal was a touch grander: to conquer the world."
He has more than his share of detractors -- just ask your neighborhood bookseller, if you can find one. But it is increasingly hard to dispute that he is the natural heir of Steve Jobs as the entrepreneur with the most effect on the way people live now.
Amazon.com, which is as much a reflection of Bezos's personality as a corporation worth $125 billion can be, is by far the fastest-growing major retailer, although that simple label long ago ceased to suffice. It is also a movie studio, an art gallery (a 1962 Picasso, "Jacqueline au Chapeau Noir," can be had for $175,000) and a publisher. It is an empire that spans much of the globe and even has its own currency, Amazon Coins. What it does not have much of, and never did, are old-fashioned profits.
The company has all sorts of regulatory and competitive concerns, making for a minefield of possible conflicts of interest for the owner of The Post. Amazon has opposed states' efforts to have e-commerce companies collect sales tax. It was the main beneficiary of the Justice Department's successful pursuit of five publishers and Apple on antitrust grounds. It is locking horns with major companies like Wal-Mart and IBM. And as it expands into same-day delivery of its products, it will come up against grocery chains and drugstores.
Through its thriving data storage division, Amazon is becoming an important contractor to the government bureaucracy that is a mainstay of The Post's reporting. If persistent rumors are true and the company produces an Amazon phone, yet another set of antagonists will arise.
Other newspaper publishers have similar, if fewer, conflicts. The Washington Post Co owns Kaplan, the for-profit education business that came under congressional scrutiny, and the company fought efforts to impose regulations. But the newspaper nonetheless maintained its commitment to investigative journalism. Some argue that it would to take more than a change of ownership to transform that culture.
"Newsrooms are very conservative," said Bill Buzenberg, executive director for the Center for Public Integrity. "They have difficulty changing and certainly they have difficulty selling out their core principles."
Perhaps. But then, few newsrooms have ever been confronted with a new owner whose zeal for disruption is matched by his obsession with tinkering until he gets it right. As Steve Yegge, a former employee, once put it, "He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies." A relevant fact: Bezos originally thought of naming Amazon "Relentless."
Marcus, now the executive editor of Harper's Magazine, said it all made sense, kind of: "Bezos is fascinated by broken business models. And whatever else you think of newspapers, the business model is broken."
There is a reason that not even the most imaginative press critics ever thought that Jeff Bezos might one day buy The Washington Post: He has never seemed much of a fan of journalism or journalists.
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