"Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire [Bezos] has built is wider...without precedent in...American capitalism." @FranklinFoer goes big: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
@FranklinFoer "Bezos’s ventures are by now so large and varied that it is difficult to truly comprehend the nature of his empire, much less the end point of his ambitions. What exactly does Jeff Bezos want? Or, to put it slightly differently, what does he believe?"
@FranklinFoer "Its website has more than 600 million items for sale...With its logistics business—and growing network of trucks & planes—it has understanding of the flow of goods around the world. If Marxist revolutionaries seized power in US, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day."
@FranklinFoer "To climb Amazon’s organizational chart is to aspire to join the inner sanctum at the very peak, called the S-Team. These are the 17 executives who assemble regularly with Bezos...The S‑Team has no African Americans; the only woman runs human resources."
@FranklinFoer "In the past several years, the company has hired more than 150 economists with PhDs, which makes Amazon a far larger employer of economists than any university in the country."
@FranklinFoer Post-HQ2, "Just as Bezos has folded himself into the fraternity of Washington power, thousands of Amazon implants will be absorbed by Washington. Executives will send their kids to the same fancy schools as journalists, think-tank fellows, and high-ranking government officials."
@FranklinFoer "Untrammeled private power might not seem the biggest threat when public power takes such abusive form. But...consider the longer sweep of history before permitting so much responsibility to pool in one man who w/o ever receiving a vote assumes roles once reserved for the state."
@FranklinFoer That's all for now. Read the whole piece. It demands reckoning.
