Jeff
Bezos
Co-founder
of Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos rubbed elbows last weekend with Halle
Berry, Chris Hemsworth and other Hollywood celebrities at an after-party
for the Golden Globes. In December, he walked
the red carpet, along with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, at a screening of
“The Post” in Washington. On Friday, Mr. Bezos and his wife,
MacKenzie, made
public their $33 million donation to a nonprofit that provides college
scholarships to so-called Dreamers, young immigrants brought to the United
States illegally as children. In October, he received an award for a
donation to a marriage equality campaign.
Jennifer
Cast, an Amazon executive who solicited the donation from him, said at the event
that they could have donated anonymously to the campaign. “But just as critical
as the money was Jeff’s offer to let us publicly acknowledge their gifts,” she
said.
“By allowing us to take
their donation public,” she added, “the world quickly knew that Jeff Bezos
supported marriage equality.”
As he was shaping
Amazon into one of the world’s most valuable companies, Mr. Bezos developed a
reputation as a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan. He preferred
to hunker down in Amazon’s hometown, Seattle, at least partly because he
thought it was better for Amazon’s growing business, largely avoiding public
causes and the black-tie circuit.
Amazon, now a behemoth
valued at more than $600 billion, has become one of the faces of “big tech,”
along with Apple, Alphabet’s Google and Facebook. These companies are facing a
backlash. Amazon is under the microscope for what critics say is its corrosive
effect on jobs and competition, and Mr. Bezos has become a bête noire for
President Trump, who repeatedly singles out him and Amazon for scorn on
Twitter.
“People are starting to
get scared of Amazon,” said Steve Case, a co-founder of America Online, who recently
started an investment fund focused on start-ups in underserved areas, with
Mr. Bezos among its contributors. “If Jeff continues to hang out in Seattle,
he’s going to get a lot more incoming. Even for just defense reasons, he has to
now play offense.”
Mr. Bezos’ portfolio of
other ventures has thrust him farther into the spotlight. In October 2013, he
bought The Washington Post for $250 million, jump-starting a renaissance of the
paper. In 2016, Mr. Bezos bought a $23 million home in Washington, one of the
city’s most expensive, which is undergoing extensive renovations to make it a
suitable party spot for the city’s political class. Nearby neighbors include
former President Barack Obama and his family, and Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka
Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Bezos’ space
start-up, Blue Origin, is also making its efforts more public, giving him
another stage. The company is
trying to rescue Earth by helping to move pollution-belching heavy industries
off the planet.
He’s getting thanked at
the Golden Globes and targeted by presidential tweet tantrums — not even Steve
Jobs had that kind of pop-culture currency,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor
of history at the University of Washington, who curated a museum exhibit in
Seattle endowed by Mr. Bezos.
In a statement, Drew
Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, said, “Jeff loves what he is doing, at Amazon,
Blue Origin and The Washington Post, and he enjoys sharing his enthusiasm in
public as he works with the teams to build and invent.”
But interviews with
more than 30 people who know Mr. Bezos, most of whom declined to be identified
to protect their relationships with him, revealed his awareness of the growing
opposition to Amazon and his growing comfort with being in the public eye.
Mr. Bezos, they said,
accepts the probability of greater government scrutiny of Amazon. The chief
executive has advised Amazon executives to conduct themselves so that they can
pass any legal or regulatory test.
The investor Warren E.
Buffett, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s, said the cautionary tale of
Microsoft, which faced a landmark antitrust case by the government that decade,
must loom in Mr. Bezos’ mind. Microsoft, by far the most dominant technology
company at the time, lost its footing after the case, opening an unexpected
opportunity for competitors.
“You’re going to get a
lot of scrutiny if you’re disrupting other people’s livelihoods,” Mr. Buffett
said.
Some of the people who
know Mr. Bezos said his new public face was for business expediency. Others
believe it is a result of personal growth.
But they all said it
was clear that Mr. Bezos and Amazon were trying to go beyond his tech persona
to show the world his other sides.
Mr. Bezos has always
been happy to play the role of Amazon’s chief pitchman, especially when he
perceives some benefit to Amazon customers from doing so, people who have
worked with him said. He submits to interviews and speaks at events when, for
instance, a new company product like the Kindle electronic reader or Echo
speaker needs to be explained to the world.
But for nearly two
decades, he was adamant that the company should largely stay out of the
political limelight and not make a stir in local communities. It also had a
bare-bones lobbying operation.
Even as he was named
Time magazine’s person of the year in 1999, he tried to avoid politics. He was
even reluctant to do photo opportunities with politicians, standard fare for
executives, one longtime former employee said.
There were business
benefits to staying out of the glare.
A hedge fund executive
in New York who caught the internet bug early, Mr. Bezos piled into a vehicle
with his wife in 1994 with the intention of finding a place to start a business
selling books on the internet. He founded Amazon later that year in Seattle, in
part because of the growing pool of technical talent Microsoft had brought to
the area.
But putting his
start-up in Washington also meant Amazon would not have to collect sales tax in
the country’s most populous states, like California, Texas and New York.
Retailers typically have an obligation to collect sales tax in states where
they have a physical presence.
For a time, for the
same reason, the company would not publicly discuss where most of its
warehouses were. And Amazon employees in Seattle who planned to travel out of
state for work had to submit itineraries for review to avoid triggering
unwanted sales tax liabilities.
Those efforts would, in
turn, give his fledgling company a further price advantage against established
physical retailers like Barnes & Noble.
It also meant that,
despite its growing legions of customers, Amazon remained almost invisible in
politics.
By the end of 2012, the
company had swelled to more than 88,000 employees and over $61 billion in
annual sales, creating huge businesses like its Prime membership service and
Amazon Web Services along the way. Yet that year the company was criticized by
leaders in Seattle and the news media for being disengaged from civic life
compared with stalwarts like Boeing and Starbucks.
I’m not aware of what
Amazon does in the community,” Sally Jewell, the chief executive of the
retailer R.E.I. at the time, said
in The Seattle Times in 2012. “It’s not a name that comes up often in the
nonprofit organizations I’m involved with.”
With investors, Mr.
Bezos gave just enough of a peek at Amazon’s business to win their confidence
while saying
as little as possible to keep competitors guessing. To this day, Amazon
will not disclose exactly how many Kindles, Echoes and other devices it has
sold, and for years it refused to reveal financial details about Amazon Web
Services, its highly profitable cloud computing business.
Despite the paucity of
details, investors have sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last
decade, dazzled by its growth.
A Growing Spotlight
A turning point came
for Mr. Bezos around 2011 when Amazon faced a public showdown with state
governments.
At the time,
legislators began hounding internet retailers like Amazon to collect sales tax.
In California, Amazon initially campaigned to overturn a new law imposing an
internet sales tax. But Mr. Bezos backed off after it became clear that
Amazon’s image could be tarnished, a former employee involved in the matter
said.
Instead, Amazon began
to make peace. In 2011, it signed an agreement with California to collect sales
tax in the state, reaching numerous similar agreements around the same time.
As part of those state
deals, Amazon began building warehouses across the country, which allowed
Amazon to deliver orders more quickly and let local politicians trumpet the
arrival of thousands of jobs.
As Mr. Bezos and the
company talked about creating jobs, though, he and Amazon faced a counternarrative
from critics that the company was really a job-killing bully
Answer:
1. The article used Simple Past Tense
The reason why this article used Simple Past
Tenses because, Simple Past Tenses is used to describing something that is
completed and it appears next to time words indicating the past.
‘’Jeff Bezos rubbed
elbows last weekend with Halle Berry, Chris Hemsworth and other Hollywood
celebrities at an after-party for the Golden Globes. In December, he walked the
red carpet, along with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, at a screening of “The Post”
in Washington.”
2. The restate of the
article:
“The company is trying
to rescue Earth by helping to move pollution-belching heavy industries off the
planet.’’
Gerund : The company is trying rescuing Earth by helping to move
pollution-belching heavy industries off the planet.
Infinitive: The
company is trying to rescue Earth by helping to move pollution-belching heavy
industries off the planet.
3. Used of personal pronouns or possessive pronouns or reflexive
pronouns on this article:
Personal Pronouns
Despite
the paucity of details , investors have sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last decade , dazzled by its growth.
of details, investors have
sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last decade, dazzled by its growth. pau
paucity of details, investors have sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last
decade, dazzled by its growth.
Despite the paucity of
details, investors have sent its stock up more than 1,100 percent over the last
decade, dazzled by its growth.
