Humans of History

Why Does Everyone Hate Jeff Bezos?

“Jeff Bezos answers questions at Startup School” by ptufts is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The richest man in the world, with a net worth of $179.9 billion, Jeff Bezos is on track to become the worlds first trillionaire. On the surface, Jeff Bezos seems like a very successful businessman with his life all put together. He is 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. With all that being said, you’d thing that the world would love him, right? Wrong. If you look on any social media platform you will always see a ton of hate towards Jeff Bezos, but why? The creator of the worlds most convenient online shopping company, why does everyone hate him?

Lets first start off with how he treats him 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 that’s in his eye range. 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 labeling his employees as incompetent. Some of these attacks are justified such as when someone tries to take credit for someone else work, but there are cases where employees could get yelled at just for not answering a question fast enough. Not only is Jeff Bezos foul to his employees, he encourages them to be harsh towards their coworkers 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, and using it to betray your fellow coworker is as easy as pie. 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 often used to sabotage colleagues.

Second, for a man who is 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 says 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 worlds richest people use the majority of their wealth for good causes, the fact that Jeff Bezos hasn’t signed it yet is alarming. With that being said we should keep in mind that Bezos 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 publics 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.

Lastly, 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 a helpless animal 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 favorable 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 Amazons 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 Amazons lawyers had to get involved shows how badly the situation had gotten.

Now, what do you think? After learning about Jeff Bezos evil tendencies, will you be yet another Jeff Bezos hater? 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 chose from and rather quick shipping. However, I would never recommend anyone to work at amazon.