The tools are not what i call battle tested. A some peopleing if amazon is a monopoly. The question for the democracy is, arwe okay with one company essentially winning capitalism . Jeff think about e call to break you guys up . Simply because the companys been successful doesnt mean its somehow too big. Narrator now on frontline. Na domion was very much the narrator amazon empire. Frontline is made possiblby contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. And the corporation for public broadcasting. Major support is provided by thn john dcatherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. And by the Ford Foundation n working with visionariese frontlines of social change worldwide. Additional support is provided by the abrams undation, committed to excellence in journalism. The park foundation,ca ded to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The hn and Helen Glessner family trust. Supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. The heisingsimons foundation unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. And by the frontle 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 colonize the planets. Bezos is laying out his plans for colonizing space. Bezos is known for going bign now hes literally shooting for the moon. Narrator in may of 2019, ff bezos, the richest person on the planet, unveiled his latest invention. This is blue moon. Its time to go back to thee moon, this t stay. Jeff has said over and over again that the most important work hes doing is work in space. Wh hes built in amazon is really important and really interesting, and its, its revolutionized commerce. But its only revolued commerce. Narrator bezoss plan is to chart a urse for the future of humanity. Manufactured worlds rotated to create artificial gravity with centrifugal force. These are very large structures, miles on end. And they hold a Million People narrator its a hes had since he was a teenager. This is me in high school. And i want to highlight thisot the earth is finite, and if the world econo and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go. I still believe that. The way jeff bezos sees iit is that consumerism is an example of how todaysociety lives better than our parents did and our grdparents. And he wants, you know, future generations to continue to have an increasingly betterst lie. These are beautiful. People are going to want to live here. Narrator bezos unveiled his time of growing concern about the empire hes built here on earth. Amazon is the great disrupter, from books to retail to grocery stores. Narrator for more than 25be years, jefs s been almost every aspec ourrming modern lives. At once you Start Connecting the dots, you see th amazon is building all of the invisible infrastructure for our futures. Amazon announced a Healthcare Partnership. Amazon is helping the c. I. A. Build a secure cloud. H much of the internet do you run . Thats a good question, um, a itot, though. Narrator but in recent years, amazon and bezos have aggressive tactics and expanding power. bezos laughing everything that is admirable abouamazon is also something that we should fear about it. Narrator for the past year, jeff bezos built his empire and at what cost. And so think about this. Big thin start small. Has its roots not in siliconpire. Lley, but on wall street thats where the young princeton graduate wt to work in the early 1990s, at a Secretive Hedge Fund called d. E. Shaw. David shaw was thone who revolutionized wall street by introducing data. And i think jeff really embraced that, that idea that, hey, if you have data, ultimately, you win. One of ththings that davisk shaw jeff bezos to do was to go and investigate new businesses, and in particular this new thing in the early 90s called the world wide web. dialup modem connecting we all know that a Communications Revolution is undeay in this country. What is the internet . Its sort of the mother of all networks. Its information highways. Itkind of like your Remote Control to the world. Narrator bezos was quick to see the Untapped Potential of the new digital landscape and was determined to get in on it. I came across this artling statistic that web usage was growing at 2,300a year. So, i decided i would try andes find a busplan that made sense in the context of that growth, and i picked books as the first best product to sell online. Because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, and that is that there are more items inhe book category than ere are items in any oth category by far. Sowhen you have that many items, youan literally build a store online that couldnt exist any other way. Narrator the store he was imagining didnt exist, so he decided to build it himself. T reaction to jeffs idea to start selling books on the internet was pretty incredulous, you know, from a lot of the people close to him. Just do it at night or over theo weekends. She didnt want to see him give up his job. Jeff called, and he told me that he and mackenzie were quitting their jobs, and they re moving to seattle and starti a company. I said, great, well, what are you going to do . He said, were goinell books. I said, nice. 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 tybody 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. Amazon means gigantic. In terms relentlessness, stping at f . Thing, thats, is that an apt description of j no. s ot that jeff stops at nothing, its that when jeffd sets his m a goal that he thinks he can achieve, he wontt until hes proven wrong or until he achieves it. Jeff and mackenzie had rented a house in bellevue. And then we moved to a small, secondfloor office in the south part of seattle. Narrator shel kaphan was amazon employee number one, one of nine former amazon insiders who agreed to talk on cara. What the company is now was nowhere in my wildest imagination. Nowhere, so,he fact that it could have thethe kind of position in the world that it has now, i had no clue. Narrator in july 1995, amazon. Com went live. It was an incredible novelty, it 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. I narrator didnt take long for bezoss vision to prove prescient. What makes us different is vast selection, convience we deliver right to the desktop. If our catalog were printed on paper, it would be the size of ebsen new york city phonks. Narrator the 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 palpable excitement in the air at thisf place, andurse at this point jeff bezos was the first person to interview every prospective employee. So i was ushered into his office. He wanted to see how ft you were on your feet. He also always wanted to know your s. A. T. Scores. He wanted to know your s. A. T. Scores . Every time, yes. How old were you atme the i was 36 or 37. This is the originasign that i me for amazon. Com. Blue sprayaint on white poster board. Jeff wasnt a figure out folklore at that point, he wasal not thethe iest man in the world. Heres my computer, amazon. Com up on the screen. Hello, jeff bezos. He was a small, nondescript, ndyhaired man sitting at a desk with ite a large and ertive laugh. laughing in multiple scenes was a normal guy to a sort of he amazing extent. Hal 9000 ha very important. Hal and i share a birt were both born on january 12. It lied, 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 tns out ideas are the eas part, execution is everything. Domination was on jeffs mind 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. D jeffs idea is that in the neardistant future, you could buy a yak from amazon. And if, and after you brout the kayak, you cou figure out good places to kayak and buy travel services from amazon. So, those ambitions were very eclear, and this was veryarly on. Het he was clearly thinking in those terms frometgo. How did that ring to you at the time . Nd a little bit exciting 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 futuristice, bookstnd the guy who owned it was suddenly talking abt selling, you know, eve object in the universe, you just werent sure how seriously to take it. bezos laughing bezos screaming playfully narrator though his public image waoften unserious. That was awesome narrator inside the company, bezos was a hardchargg manager relentlessly focused on the principle that would make amazon one of the most trusted bran 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 custer expience. 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 stag narrator jennifer cast 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. Lad so, you know, it was a where we knew 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. It was exhilarating. We were all aligned around building for customers. Hey, you guys. Hey. E ezos laughs ive heard ths an empty chair that would often be put at meetings. Yeah. Who was in the pty chair . Yeah, so that empty chair was there to remind us all to understand t customer, have empathy for the customer, understand the details of the customer experie e. The customer isnt there, we have to bring forward the voicef he customer. phone ringing thank you for calling amazon. Com. Learned that in th onlineickly world, he could understand exactly how customers were behaving. All orders do need to be placed online. It was madelear from the beginning th Data Collection was also one of amazons businesses. All Customer Behavior that flowed through the site was recorded and tracked. And that itself was a valuabley. Commod have you visited our website . Navigated through the site. Tomer so we could see what you looked at, we could ae what you paused at, we could see what you put your basket but didnt order, we could see what you put in your basket and did order. So thats when we starte realizing, man, this is rich. This is rich, rich, rich. And so weve used it forhi ever. 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. Narrator bezos 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 account, you take maybe when they were last on the site, how long they were on the 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 othe most fascinating kind of tools we have at our disposal is the ability to do active experiments. Its, you know, its kind of we did not think about it as exploiting, we thought about helping people make better decisions. I was starting to feel that that was less spectful toward the consumer, who was, aft 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 poible during each visit. And that felt a little more unsavory. As but thathe business of amazon. Amazon has added 880,000 new customers. Narrator while bezos was using these insights to brin more and more customers into amon. The number of customers who use thwebsite has increased fourfold. Narrator there was one thing he hadnt done yet. The companys never made a profit. Thats right. Now, why. How does that. Why. How does that. . It seems like a new math, doesnt it . It does. To nar bezos would spend years losing money trying to beat his competition, and he convinced investors to gong with it. One of jeff bezos greatest accomplishnts has been hiset ability to wall street to t acce fact the first 20some years, amazon wasnt and thats okay because theyre building infrastructe that will cate huge opportunitieso for themin scale and gain customers and gain business. Narrator he spelled it out after the company t wenters blic its all about the long term, he wrote, ratherho thanterm profits or wall street reactions. He essentially says, we are going to forego profits in order to take market shar that our strategy is to lose money, which enables us then to put other companies out of business who cant afford to lose money. Ntor that strategy wouldnt sit well witics like stacy mitchell, who advocates for small businesses. In essence, at the very beginning, hes signaling to shareholders, have a strategy to monopolize the market, and thats going to reward y, but its going to be far down the road, and will you come along with me . An they said yes. Narrator investors also recognized bezos essentialov which had to chargrtores, 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 they can. What booksellers were saying to me is that, this is driving my customers to amazon. Theyll come into the store, theyll browse, they find what theyant, but then theyll go buy it on amazon, because they can save that saletax. So it was a very irksome,ig early,ssue for the book vendors, first of all, they were kind of the canaries in theso mineo speak, and then lots of other retailers. Amazon has added thousands of warehouse workers and three f million squat of space. Narrator amazons salestax advantage would be central to its success as it expanded beyond books, into other products. And we have a fantastic selection of things you can thok at. Electronics and en of course toys. Yeah, thank you, here is, weve got have the friendly pokemon. This is more than ten times e selection that you will find in a typical, physical World Software store. Narrator but bezos was stil ng way from his goal of amazon being the place where you could buy everything online. drills whirring and he saw a way to achieve it. Amazon could soon become thee walmart ofnternet. Narrator there were thousands of businesses ger to se online. Bezos offered them a way to do it. Amazon is traforming itself om an online bookstore to an online mall. Nartor he transformed amazon into a retail platform ere anyone could sell their goods to his customers and invited thousands of other businesses to be a part of it. E its siest place r anybody, small or large, who tonts to set up shop onlin sell online, because they can access our 12 millionplus customers. Anybody, all comers. Were talng about hundreds of thousands of companies with literally tens of millions of products. Narrator namebrand stores started selling on bezos platform, and so did tens of thousands ofmall entrepreneurs. Everyone knew amazon. Com. The only people that knew superduperhoops. Com were the s ones that werching to buy a basketball hoop and saw 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 rercgnizable name in ecommee. Ra narr not only would he take a cut of everything other businesses sold, hed also keep his own store on the platform, competing against everyone elsee in t marketplace he owned and controlled. E hns the main street. He has the main street real estate. Not just one building on the rner, the entire main street. Narrator how amazon wouldov wield its poer the online marketplace would evly become a question for government regulators, but early on, therei weications. The first to see them were Book Publishers. Amazon took over a large maet share of the Publishing Industry very, very fast. Ey were very quickly in position to demand concessions. Yoknow, i think that was a 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 the e 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. E cheetah looks for the weak, looks for the sick, looks for the small, thats what you go for. So dont start with, you know, number one publisher. Start with number seven publisher and then number six publisher, and by the time you get to number three, two, and one, the noise has gone, gten back to them. Theyre going to know this is maming, and chances are yo be able to settle that without a fullon war. We were just this little mo,and pop publishing compa publishingoetry books and translated fiction narrator in the early 2000s, the number of books de johnson was selling on amazon had been rising steadily. Then one day, he got a phone call. Our distrutor called us up to talk about our 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. Thats the word 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 miller ran the european book team and says he sawothing wrong with amazons tough tactics to challenge publishers on prices and profit margins. In order to bring them into