How Amazon’s ‘smiling assassin’ Jeff Bezos went from super-geek to king of the world

“The narrative with Bezos and Amazon then was: ‘what’s wrong with the investment community that they continue to fund a business that loses money with every transaction?” says Steven Weber, a professor of technology and global politics at the University of California, Berkeley. “[Investors believed] that it was playing the game of the dotcom era – pay the cost to acquire customers, and once we have that market owned we’ll raise profits.”

What changed that, Weber says, was Amazon Web Services (AWS). Spun off from Amazon’s own internal cloud computing division in 2006, it initially seemed a strange venture to many. “Why should a company that has set its heart on being the best e-commerce business also try to become the best in server technology?”, Murdoch recalls.

Over the next ten years AWS became the backbone of the internet, letting smaller companies rent computing power as easily as they might rent electricity (Bezos has compared it to the first utility companies). In 2015 it made its first profit, transforming Amazon’s finances and triggering a gigantic stock rally which made Bezos’s fortune and which continues to this day.

For Murdoch, AWS epitomises the audacious Tao of Bezos. “He doesn’t really care what other people think, and he doesn’t care about Wall Street either,” he says. “Most chief executives would listen to Wall Street and wouldn’t make such a bold decision as AWS. It’s a good example of him being a long-term strategic thinker.” 

The turnaround confirmed Bezos as a cult figure among business strategists, who often cite his regular shareholder letters. It coincided with a transformation in his personal image, most visible in widely-discussed 2017 photos of his suddenly bulging muscles and his high-profile affair with the actress and TV anchor Lauren Sánchez. It also seems to have given him the time to return to his teenage space obsession, funding and personally joining an oceanic expedition to recover the sunken rocket engines that threw Neil Armstrong towards the moon.

The deca-billionaire will therefore no doubt go before Congress with deep reserves of swagger. Some members might raise an eyebrow at Amazon’s estimated 38pc share of US e-commerce and its 32pc share of the cloud computing market – to say nothing of his 1999 statement that “a level playing field” is not desirable “when you’re marching into battle”. But Weber argues that AWS, which is a key vendor to the US government and military, is a political ace in the hole as well as a financial one.

“If I were Bezos I might want to say: ‘the thing I am most proud of is actually AWS’,” he says, imagining the tycoon’s pitch.”‘It has lowered the barrier for entrepreneurship in the US, and created the possibility for smaller companies’. How many jobs has Facebook created?’…

“Americans love that kind of audacity if it works out. If it doesn’t work you’re a moron and a criminal. If it does work out you’re a genius and a visionary.” 

With an average wealth increase of $12m every hour, it would be hard to argue with the results.