And that assumption would be incorrect. The tools are not what call battle tested. Some people asking if amazo is a monopoly. The question for the democracy is, e we okay with one company esntially winning capitalism . How do you and jeff think about the call to break you guys up . Simply because the companys be successful doesnt mean its somehow too big. Narrator now on frontline. Mi dotion was very much the idea. Narrator amazon empire. Frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Anby the corporation for public broadcasting. Major support is provided by th johnd catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. And by the Ford Foundation working with visionarithe frontlines of social change worldwide. Additional support is provided by the abramfoundation, committed to excellence in journalism. The park foundation,di ted to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. Thjohn and Helen Glessner family trust. Supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. The heisingsimons foundation opportunity, and possibilities. And by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. And Additional Support from ura debonis and scott nathan. Jeff bezos has already conquered the retail frontier. Now hes got a plan to colonizel thets. Bezos is laying out his plans for colonizing space. Bezos is known for going big, d now hes literally shooting for the moon. Narrator in may of 2019, jeff bezos, the richest person on the planet, unvled his latest invention. This is blue moon. Its time to go back to theim moon, thisto stay. Jeff has said over and over again that the most important work hes doing is work in space. What hes built in amazon is really imptant and really interesting, and its, its relutionized commerce. But its only revolutionized commerce. Narrator bezoss plan is to chart a new course for the future of humanity. Manufactured worlds rotated to create arficial gravity with centrifugal force. These are very large structures, miles on end. And they hold a Million People or more each. S narrator i idea hes had since he was a teenager. This is me in high school. And i want to ghlight this quote the earth is finite, and if the World Economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go. I still believe that. The way jeff bezos sees is it is that consumerism is an example of how tods society lives better than our parents did and ougrandparents. And he wants, you know, future generations to continue to have an increasingly better lifestyle. A the beautiful. People are going to want to live here. Narrator ezos unveiled his extraterrestrial plans at a time of growing concern about the empire hes built here on earth. Amazon is the great disrupter, from books to retailo to grocerys. Narrator for more than 25 years, jeff bezos has been t srupting and transforming almost every aspof our modern lives. Once you Start Connecting the dots, you see that amazon is a buildi of the invisible infrastructure for our futures. Amazon announced a Healthcare Partnership. Amazon is helping the c. I. A. Build a secure cloud. How much of the internet do you run . T ta good question, um, its a lot, though. Narrator but in recent years, amazon and bezos have come under scrutiny for their aggressive tactics and expanding power. bezos laughing g everythat is admirable abouamazon is also something that we should fear about it. Narrator for the past year weve been investigating how jeff bezos built his empire and at what cost. And so think about this. Big things start small. Narrator jeff bezoss empire has its roots not in silicon valley, but on wall st. Thats where the young princeton graduate went to work in the early 1990s, at a Secretive Hedge Fund called d. E. Shaw. David shaw was thone who w revolutionizl street by introducing data. And i think jeff really embraced that, that idea that, hey, if u you have datimately, you win. One of ththings that david shaw asked jeff bezos to do was wto go and instigate ne businesses, and in particular 90s called the world wide web. dialup modem connecting we all know that a Communications Revolution is unrway in this country. What is the internet . Its sort of the mother of all networks. Is information highways. T kind of like your Remote Control to the world. Nartor bezos was quick to see the Untapped Potential of the new digital landscape and was determined to get in on it. I came across thistartlin statistic that web usage was growing at 2,300 a year. So, i decided i would try andin find a bs plan that made sense in the context of that growth, and i picked books as the first best product to sell online. Because books are incribly unusual in one respect, and that is that there are more items inhe boocategory than there are items in any other category by far. So, when you have that many items,ou can litally build a store online that couldnt exist any other wa narrator the store he was imagining didnt exist, so he decided to build it himself. Ea the reaction to jeffs to start selling books on the internet was pretty incredulous, you know, from a lot of the people close to him. His mom tried to convince him to just do it at night or over the weekends. She didnt want to see him give upis job. Jeff called, and he told me h thand mackenzie were quitting their jobs, and they were moving to seattle and starti a company. Said, great, well, what are you going to do . He said, were going to sell books. I said, nic he said, on the internet. I said, oh. Jeff, why will anybody buy anything from you . And he said, well, were going to have more books than anybody else. Narrator one of the first names bezos considered for his newebsite was relentless. Com. Why relentless . Relentless meant, we move on no matter what. He ultimately, obviously, decided that relentless wasnt quite the right fit. Amazon, earths largest river, was. Am on means gigantic. In terms of relentlessness, opping at nothing, thats, is that an aptf description of no. It not that jeff stops at nothing, its that when jeffin sets hison a goal that he thinks he can achieve, he wont op until hes proven wrong or until he achieves it. Jeff and mackenzie had rented a house in bellevue. D then we moved to a small, secondfloor office in the south part of seattle. Narrator shel kaphan was amazon empyee number one, one of nine former amazon insiders who agreed to talk on camera. Whathe company is now was nowhere in my wildest imagination. Nowhere,o, the fact that it could have thethe kind of position in the world thatt has now, i had no clue. Narrator in july 1995, amazon. Com went ve. It was an incredible novelty, was tiny and obscure, and its very hard to imagine, but the entire universe that amazon now dominates did not exist. Amazon. Com, this virtual shop claims to be the Worlds Largest bookstore. Narrator it didnt take long for bezoss vision to prove prescient. What makes us different is vast selection, convenience we deliver right to the desktop. If our catalog were printed on paper, it would be the size of sen new york city ebooks. Narrator he Company Quickly outgrew the garage and soon had more than 50 employees. In 1996, james marcus applied to be number 55. There was a very palpableth excitement in air at this place, and of course at thisin jeff bezos was the first person to interview every prospective employee. So i was ushered into his office. He wanted to see how fast you were on your feet. A o always wanted to know your s. A. T. Scores. He nted to know your s. A. T. Scores . Every time, yes. How old were you at the time . I was 36 or 37. This is the origil sign that i made for amazon. Com. Bluepray paint on white post board. Jeff wasnt a figure out folklore at that point, he wase not thealthiest man in the world. Heres my computer, amazon. Com up onhe screen. Hello, jeff bezos. He was a small, nondescript, ndyhaired man sting at a desk wh quite a large and ertive laugh. laughing in multiple scenes was a normal guy to a sort of he amazing extent. Hal 9000 hat, very important. Hal and i share a birthday, were th born january 12. It belied, you know, an enormous, napoleonic ambition. One of the people i really like, thomas edison, heres a model of his original light bulb. Hes famous for saying, one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. laughs it turns out ideas are the easy part, execution is everything. Domination was on jeffs nd from the beginning. One of his sort of secondincommand people said to me, you have to understand that jeff wants to sell many more things than books. And jeffs idea is that in the neardistant future, you could buy a kayak from amazon. And if, and after you brout the kayak, you cou figure out good places to kayak and buy so, those ambition veryazon. Clear, and this was very early on. But he was clearly thinking in t those terms fr getgo. How did that ring to you at the time . A little bit exciti a little bit nutty. Amazon. Com, very good website. You should really try it. bezos laughs if you signed on to work at aa kind of futuristic owned it was suddenly talking about selling, you know, every object in the iverse, you just werent sure how seriously to take it. bezos laughing bezos screaming playfully narrator though his public image was often unserious. That was awesome narrator inside company, bezos was a hardcharging manager relentlessly focused on the principle that would make amazon one of the most trusted brds in the world the customer always comes first. This culture of customer obsession. Obsessive focus on customer. Obsesses over our customers. Totally obsessing over the custerxperience. We used to call it customer ecstasy. It means building, delivering, focusing on your customer. And we did it, you know, in the very, very early days at every narrator jennist was there in the early days and is one of six top amazon executives the company put forward to speak to us. Customer obsession was our north star. And so, you know, it was a place where wenew we were a part of something that was new, the internet. There was an excitement that we were doing something that hadnt been done before. We were all aligned around building for customers. Hey, you guys. Hey. bezos laughs er ive heard was an empty chair that would often be put at meetings. Yea who was in the pty chair . Yeah, so that empty chair was there to remind us all to understand the customer, have empathy for the customer, understand the details of the customer expernce. The customer isnt there, we have to bring forward the voice of the customer. phone ringing thank you for calling. Amazon. C narrator and bezos quickly world, he could understandnline exactly how customers were behaving. All orders do need be placed online. It was made clear from the beginning th Data Collection waalso one of amazons businesses. All Customer Behavior that flowed through the site was recorded and tracked. And that itself was a valuableit comm have you visited our website . We could track how a customer navigated through the site. So we could see what you lookeds at, we couldsee what you paused at, we could see what you puin your basket but didn order, we could see what youut in your basket and did order. Tedthats when we st realizing, man, this is rich. This is rich, rich, rich. And so weve used it forer hing. What do you do with that information . Thats the data that allows us to predict, or try to predict, what books that you would like that you havent discovered yet. B narrator ezos treated the site as a laboratory, where he studied Customer Behavior along with his chief scientist andreas weigend. I was shocked to see how predictable people are. If you take the time of the day into accou, if you take maybe how long they werethe site site, last time, how lontheyre on the site today, you know what theyre falling for. Whoever owns, collects, the data, if you have access to it and rights to data, then you are king. Its all about the data. Everything. One of the most fascinating kind of tools we have at o disposal is the ability to do active experiments. Its, you know, its kind of this huge laboratory. We did not think about it as exploiting, we thought about helping peopleake better decisions. I was starting to feel that that was ls respectful toward the consumer, who was,fter all, supposed to be our god, the person whose ecstasy was our very reason for being. And it was closer to getting a cow into a milking stall and extracting as many pails as ssible during each visit and that felt a little more unsavory. But that was the business of amazon. Amazon has added 880,000 new narrator while bezos was using these insights to bring more and more customers into amazon. The number of customers who see the website has increa fourfold. Ne narrator there was o thing he hadnt done yet. The companys never made a profit. Thats right. Why. How does that. . That. It seems like a new math, doesnt it . It does. Ra nr bezos would spend years losing money trying to beat his competition, and he convinced investors to go ong with it. One of jeff bezosgreatest accomplishnts has been his g ability toet wall street to accept the fact the first 20somyears, amazon wasnt going to be very profitable. And thats okay because theyre building infrastructe at ll cate huge opportunities for them to gain scale and gain customers and gain business. Narrator he spelled it out in a letter to shaholders after the Company First went blic its all about the long term, he wrote, than shortterm profits or wallr strections. He essentially says, we are going to forego profits in order to take market share. That our strategy is to lose money, which enables us then to put other companies out of business who cant afford to lose money. Narrator that strategy wouldnt sit well with critics like stacy mitchell, who advocates for small businesses. Beginning, hes signaling to shareholders, i have a strategy to monopolizthe market, and thats going to reward you, but its going to be far down the road, d will you come along with me . And they said yes. Narrator investors also recognized bezos essentiale vantager physical stores, which had to charge their customers sales tax, unlike online businesses. So, not collecting sales tax gave amazon a big leg up over bricks and mortar retailers. And that was central to their early strategy of gaining market share as quickly as theya n. What booksellers were saying to me is that, this is drivingt my customeamazon. Theyll come into the store, theyll browse, they find what thgo want, but then theyll buy it on amazon, because they can save that salex. So it was a very irksome,y, eaig issue for the book vendors, first of all, they were kind of the canaries in thene so to speak, and then lots of other retailers. Amazon has added thousands of warehouse workers and three million square feet of space. Nartor amazons salestax advantage would be central to its success as it expanded beyond books, into other products. And we have a fantasticn select things you can look at. Electronics and then of course toys. Yeah, thank you, here is, weve got have the friendly pokemon. This is more than ten times the selection th you will find in a typical, physical World Software store. Narrator but bezos was still a long way from his goal of amaz being the place where y could buy everything online. drills whirng and he saw a way to achieve it. Amazon could soon become the walmart of the internet. Narrator the were thousands of businesses eager to sell online. Bezos offered them a way to do it. Amazon is tnsforming itself from an online bookstore to an online mall. Nrator he transformed amazon into a retail platform ere anyone could sell their goods to his customers and invited thousands of othero businesses a part of it. Its the easiest place r anybody, small or large, who wants to set up shop online to sell online, because ty can access our 12 millionplus customers. Anybody, all comers. Werealking about hundreds of thousands of companies withy literalltens of millions of products. Narrator namebrand stores started selling on bez platform, and so did tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs. Everyone knew amazon. Com. The only people thatnew superduperhoops. Com were the ones that were searching to buy a basketball hoop ansaw our name on an advertisement. To us it was really a nobrainer. We knew that we would, you know, increase our sales. First year we did 100,000, next year we did a million, we did two million, four million, we were doubling every year in the early days. Narrator it was great for the companies and even greater for jeff bezos. Amazon has become the most merecognizable name in ecrce. Narrator not only would he take a cut of everything other businesses sold, hed also keep his own store on the platform, competing against everyone elset he marketplace he owned and controlled. E owns the main street. Ai he has the mstreet real estate. Corner, the entire main street. Narrator how amazon wouldr marketplace would allyine become a question for government regulators, but early on, theree ndications. The first to see them were Book Publishers. Amazon took over a large market share of the Publishing Industry very, very fast. Athey were very quickly i position to demand concessions. U know, i think that was moment where publishers started to realize, oh, wait a minute, like, we. Theyre our partner, but they now have the beginnings of a boot on our windpipe. Narrator inside the company, they had launched a strategy that some called thlle project, because theyd heard bezos wanted them to pursue publishers the way a cheetah pursues a sickly gazelle. Well, you dont go after the strongest. Its like the cheetah. The cheetah looks for the weak, looks for the sick, looks for the small, thats what you go for. So dont start with, younow, number one publisher. Start with number seven publisher, and by the time you get to number three, two, and one, the noise has gone,otten back to them. Theyre going to know this is u coming, and chances are y be able to settle that without a fullon war. We were just this little nym and pop publishing com publishingoetry books and translated ficti. The number of booknnisrly 2000s, johnson was selling on amazon had been rising steadily. Then one day, he got a phone call. Our distributor called us up to talk abouour amazon contract. S and d, i went out to dinner last night with amazon, it was like going out to dinner with the godfather. They want a kickback. He thats tord he used, kickback. And he said they wanted four percent more of our sales. Was that unusual . It was. In our experience, it was totally unprecedented, yes. Narrator randy m