Born and raised in Albuquerque, N.M., Jeff Bezos didn’t enter the world rich. However, he has since accumulated $199.6 billion. On the surface, he seems like a very successful businessman. He was the CEO of Amazon, a very successful online shopping company which has now grown to one of the most powerful companies on the planet. Not only did he bring himself up from nothing and start Amazon at the golden age of 30, he is also the first person in modern history to accumulate a fortune of over $200 billion. Wouldn’t the world love him? Wrong. Why? If you look on any social media platform you will always see a ton of hate towards Jeff Bezos.
Source: CNBC.com
Let’s first start off with how he treats his employees. In the book The Everything Store, author Brad Stone depicts Jeff Bezos tendency to go ballistic when an employee doesn’t meet his expectations. The businessman has a pattern of throwing bitter insults at any unfortunate employee. Amazon Veterans have actually thrown together a list of the harshest things Jeff Bezos has said ranging from “Why are you wasting my life?” and “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?” to even going as far as labelling his employees as incompetent. Some of these attacks are justified such as when someone tries to take credit for someone else’s work, but there are cases where employees could get yelled for not answering a question fast enough. Not only is Jeff Bezos foul to his employees, he encourages them to be harsh towards their co-workers too. According to the New York Times, Bezos and Amazon have thrown the concept of teamwork right into the trash. He wants his employees to be against each other so much that he even included a feature in the company’s internal phone directory that instructs how to give secret feedback on certain employees to bosses. The system is called the Anytime Feedback tool. Using it to betray your fellow co-worker is easy. The tool even includes sample texts such as: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.” Numerous employees say the tool is used to sabotage colleagues.
Bezos might have upped the minimum wage for Amazon employees to $15.50 per hour, but his overall treatment of his people hasn't improved. Employees are forced to stand on their feet for 10–12 hours per day, and any unscheduled breaks longer than five minutes can result in immediate termination.
For a man estimated to make $149,353 a minute, Jeff Bezos seems to have a strange relationship with charity. In 2018 in an interview with Mathias Döphner, Jeff Bezos said that the only way he can see his money being used is spending it on his space company, Blue Origin. Out of the four richest Americans, AOL says Jeff Bezos is the most elusive about charity. Although being the richest man in the world he is the only one out of the four that has not signed the Giving Pledge. The Giving Pledge makes the world’s richest people use the majority of their wealth for good causes. Bezos however has made some charitable donations over the years. In 2018 he started the Day One Fund, which aims to donate $2 billion to address homelessness and education issues. However, Vox points out that the fund is rather vague and could be ineffective and many people like Recode are suspicious that Jeff Bezos is not doing this with good intentions, but just to get out of the public’s eye. Putting all of Bezos integrity aside even if the Day One Fund turns out to be successful, its still pennies compared to the rest of his wealth.
In addition, he attacks book publishers like “sickly gazelles.” In the beginning when Amazon was just starting out, many small publishers took this as a new opportunity to distribute their books. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. The Everything Store reveals that Jeff Bezos doesn’t think of those small publishers as equals, rather he views the publishing business and industry as helpless animals just waiting for a predator. Soon enough the small publishers started to become very reliant on Amazon for sales, so the company took advantage of that and started demanding more favourable contracts. It became so bad that The Everything Store even called this straight-up sadistic. This treatment came directly from the CEO himself, Bezos had ordered his employees to “approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” As a result of this mandate, some Amazon executives took pleasure in abusing the publishers. It got so bad that the Amazon’s lawyers started to feel a little worried about the situation. Eventually, they stepped in and made Amazon rename the program from the Gazelle Project to a more cooperate-friendly Small Publishers Negotiation Program. The fact that Amazon’s lawyers had to get involved shows how badly the situation had become.
Putting all of Jeff Bezos bad characteristics aside, Amazon is one of the most convenient online places to shop, no matter how bad the CEO is. It has a wide variety of products to choose from and rather quick shipping. What do you think? After learning about Jeff Bezos negative tendencies, will you work in Amazon?
References:
Why does everyone hate Jeff Bezos? Kalkidan Legesse, https://jacksonjournal.news
Why do people hate Jeff Bezos? Well, it’s complicated, Rachel Curry, https://marketrealist.com
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