Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli

26:57Literally got to walk through the store and see what's doing well. You have to walk through the store. Right. And people love to do it. It's like a really delightful experience, right? So the head of the team goes about hiring the senior executive from Trader Joe's. She doesn't really know what her job's going to be. Moves out to Seattle. And her first week in Seattle stumbles across this really secretive room, conference room. It has paper over the doors and the walls, brown paper so you can't see inside. And she goes inside and it's filled with Trader Joe's boxes of foods. And she has this light bulb moment like, oh, crap.

27:30I've been hired to replicate my former employer from there her boss starts hounding her saying give me any documents you retained from your time at Trader Joe's and which is clearly like and the correct answer is I have no documents that they made me turn everything in as per my prior employment agreement or if I do I cannot give them over to you because that's actually illegal okay so she says no the boss keeps hounding her hounding her and like it becomes this really tense experience. Then she emails him the top selling items from Trader Joe's from one whole week in the US, ranked by products that were sold.

28:07And they start to disseminate that within the team. They have their blueprint to copy the top 200 items at Trader Joe's. And then he doesn't stop there. He says, now send me all the margins. Really? And she says, no, I'm not doing that. And he screams at her in the middle of the Seattle office. She starts crying. And someone reports to HR because it was just like such a clear violation. And Amazon actually fired those people because it went up to HR. But that sort of scenario plays out at Amazon every single team. I want to stay with the idea of some of the earlier advantages that Amazon had and how it resulted in their growth.

28:41We'll get to diapers.com. We'll get to some of the other competitors. Let's talk about the state tax advantage. So talk about arbitrage. Bezos specifically picks Washington state because there's so few shoppers in the state that by locating there and shipping to the rest of the country, he doesn't believe he has to collect state sales tax because of an old Supreme Court case. Maybe it involved a catalog. It wasn't Sears, was it? It was a catalog. It wasn't Sears. That said, hey, you only collect, interstate commerce is not taxable. Therefore, you don't have to collect it. It's only unless you have a nexus to that state.

29:27So immediately they're at a six, seven, eight percent advantage over everybody else in most states. Tell us how they push the envelope with state sales tax. Oh, this was simultaneously brilliant, but like horrifying for the rest of retail. He comes up with this idea that his warehouses don't count as physical locations for Amazon. Which is kind of bizarre because of course it is. Right. I mean, if you locate a warehouse in New York, you now have a nexus with New York. But they tried to carve that out as a separate entity. And up until 2017, Amazon was not collecting sales tax in some states. So they had a 20-year head start.

30:07Exactly. And up to 10 % in some of these states. And that just had ripple effects because people, once the advent of online shopping came about, people became really price conscious. You know, people would do comparison shopping. And I spoke to, you know, one of the presidents of Sears who had to deal with this head on. And he said, you know, Amazon and him would be selling the same Sony television. Let's say it's$500 market the price. Amazon for many states could sell that for$500 flat. Sears would have to charge 8 % sales tax in New York. So what would Sears do? They would cut the price of their TV by 8 % in order to go head to head with Amazon.

30:45and they would just completely destroy their margins. And it created this race to the bottom on electronics prices because they had to try to compete, but at a loss. And this happened in so many companies where they either couldn't compete and they lost the sale to Amazon or they cut their prices and they destroyed their margins. And that's like a very easy way to go bankrupt. So with the benefit of hindsight, you look at they have this advantage for 20 years, which is a long time. I'm kind of shocked that states didn't stand up and say, not only are we losing jobs in our states, but we're losing tens of millions or hundreds of millions in tax revenue.

31:26Why did the various states tolerate this for as long as they did? That's a really good question. I spoke to someone in Amazon's public policy office that worked on this, and he said, like, this was our secret sauce. And Amazon fought tooth and nail to preserve it, to not get rid of this advantage they had. And so they'd go to court. They would go before Congress and make their case. And some states did come knocking. Wherever there isn't a state income tax, there's usually a state sales tax. Right. So if you open a warehouse there and the state is losing a lot of revenue, why wouldn't they just sue Amazon and say, hey, we figured out you sold this many goods in our state and you owe sales tax here because you have a nexus?

32:07Well, part of what I found is that many of these legislators in the states were very short-sighted. They wanted to put out press releases that, oh, we got an Amazon warehouse with all of these temporary jobs. And there's this horrible scene in the book where Jerry Storch, who's the CEO of Toys R Us at the time, which is one of New Jersey's largest employers. Right. Speaks to Chris Christie. He speaks to Chris Christie and he says, you guys are killing me. Why are you not making Amazon collect sales tax in New Jersey? You're putting Toys R Us out of business. You're going to put Main Street out of business.

32:34and Chris Christie sort of yay-ay-ayas him. And then a year later, they announced this big Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey. They give Amazon all these tax credits for it. And Chris Christie gets to put out the press release that they're bringing hundreds of jobs to New Jersey. But Jerry's whole point was, okay, you're getting hundreds of jobs there. You're going to lose thousands of jobs just from my one company. So that's really short-sighted. And that's what happened. Toys R Us went out of business. It's amazing how effective they were manipulating so many self-interested politicians who are so short-sighted.

33:07But we saw that time and time again. It was fascinating that the Amazon 2 HQ was slated for New York. And a lot of people in New York said, this is a money losing deal. This isn't, this is a wealthy company. Why do we have to give them tax breaks? They have to compete with everybody else. And they said, screw you, we're going to DC. And New York was one of the rare cities to really call them out on that. Just think about the frenzy around hundreds of different cities lobbied and put in these very intensive applications for the pleasure of having these warehouse jobs and the second headquarters there.

33:41And that just shows how politicians really just want the jobs. Right. That's right. And so it was kind of interesting that when you ran the numbers, as people in New York did, it wasn't a good deal. And they ended up sort of splitting it. It's kind of part in Virginia. and where did the rest of the Amazon headquarters end up going? Oh, it's in Virginia, but they haven't broken ground on a lot of it. Oh, really? Yeah. So that was years ago. I mean, after all those crazy contests and RFPs and submissions, they got like 200 cities applying for this. They still haven't broken ground. That's amazing.

34:18They have one building up for sure, but the whole plan has not come to fruition. Ironically, if you take the Long Island Expressway out past Jericho-Syosset, You'll see this immense warehouse that they built that used to just be like an empty parking lot. I don't know what was there. For years it was rumored that something was coming. And what a perfect location right off the highway. Why do you need to give – that gives them access to 40 million people or 50 million people online. Why would you have to give them a tax break for that? That's where the customers are. shouldn't their business model be able to accommodate building a warehouse?

34:58I mean, they have something like$6.5 billion in subsidies on taxes from different jurisdictions around the US. It's pretty staggering. Yeah, that's really amazing. The other thing that was so disruptive was how Amazon changed how Wall Street itself viewed retailers, both in terms of profit versus growth and startups versus established retailers. Talk a little bit about the impact Amazon had on how Wall Street thought about other companies. Yeah, this was huge. There probably wouldn't be an Amazon today if Jeff did not convince Wall Street that we don't have to make profits. Right. His initial shareholder letter was, hey, don't expect profits for the next 10 or 20 years.

35:39Exactly. And that just was not the norm back then. It is today, but that was definitely not the norm. And this just gave him a tremendous roadway to reinvest in his business and grow and steal share and cut on prices to get customers. And not pay federal taxes because if you're not profitable, no taxes. That's a great point. Low tax rate. And that really destroyed his competitors because they couldn't catch up with him on online shopping. I spoke to a lot of these CEOs who went head to head with Amazon in the 1990s and 2000s. One of them was the CEO of Linens and Things. And I said, why were you all so late to online shopping?

36:14Did you not believe in it? And he said, Dana, we believed in it, but my boardroom, my board of directors laughed me out of the room when I asked for$100 million to get our e-commerce and logistics up and running because that would have tanked our earnings. That would have tanked our share price. There's a little bit of short termism there because, and again, we have the benefit of hindsight, but he obviously saw what was coming, why can't you say to the board, look, here's the trade-off. Either we spend$100 million now and be able to compete with them and lose some stock price for a couple of quarters or years, or we're dead.

36:53Those are your choices. You want a little bit of a pullback now, or you just want to go bankrupt. But there's nothing in between. Retail is a notoriously hard business. It could be low margin. And they have to manage to Wall Street quarter to quarter. And the CEO told me, we couldn't miss one quarter of earnings, let alone years of them like Bezos did. I'd be out of a job. I would be fired. The company could go bankrupt. And that was exactly what was going on in every company that was trying to compete with them to the point where so many of them had to outsource their logistics to Amazon, which was their main competitor.

37:26Go through the list. Toys R Us, Linens and Things, Target. Why on earth would Target, which is a giant company, outsourced its e-commerce to Amazon. Well, Jerry Storch, who was the CEO of Toys R Us, first worked at Target on.com, and he told me a story that he got yelled at by senior leaders for spending$10 ,000 on buying the domain name TargetStores.com. That's an amazing story in the book, which is like$10 ,000 for a domain like that is a rounding error. But they have to be so careful with their money because it's a hard business, right? And so yeah, Target borders Toys R Us. And they had to outsource it which meant Amazon kept their customer data.

38:05They paid Amazon a fee for shipping it. They paid Amazon a fee for listing it. They paid Amazon all these fees and Amazon had all the upside. And they figured out, you write in the book, they figured out that if they were losing$65, $70 million a year on their site, hey, we could charge them$50 million and it's a cost saving for them. Yeah, they just came up with an arbitrary number below that threshold. Just astonishing. So let's stay with books for a minute. I'm fascinated that Barnes & Noble tries to respond very aggressively to Amazon, and they figure we're going to take over wholesaler Ingram in order to get a little more bulk, be able to withstand Amazon, which at that point had become a substantial market share of the book-selling world.

38:53And Amazon gets the takeover stopped on antitrust grounds. How ironic. Explain what happened there. Yeah. So Barnes & Noble, in order to stay competitive, tries to buy Ingram, this book distributor that Amazon also used. And Amazon cried foul and said this should be an antitrust violation. And basically, Amazon, even today, sometimes has this mentality that they are the David going up against Goliath, even though that has not been true for a very, very long time, including in that anecdote. Amazon, by market value, was way bigger than Barnes & Noble at that time. And Len Riggio, the CEO of Barnes & Noble at the time, calls them out on it.

39:25He says, you're crying foul and pretending like this is going to hurt this little player, but you are the behemoth here. You know, the regulators do turn it down.

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40:24I'm Scarlett Foo. And I'm Paul Sweeney. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts. So we were talking earlier about Amazon's lack of profitability for the first couple of years. It's kind of interesting how Bezos's initial shareholder letter, I want to say 96, something like that? 97, the same year as the IPO, warned investors not to expect profits for years to come. We're going to spend a billion dollars building out our website. Not only did this not have a negative impact, Wall Street applauded the profitless growth. Tell us a little bit about what an advantage and how prescient that shareholder letter from Bezos was.

41:11I mean, he trained his shareholders essentially to not expect anything. And he was very clear communicating that. But it also just gave them roadway to take all their money and say, you know, books are not the be all end all. We're going to use this as a test case. We're going to make some money and then we're going to take all that money and put it into expanding our verticals. Let's open this up to toys. Let's open this up to electronics. It allowed them to build the everything store. And then it allowed them to put this money toward other areas of growth beyond retail and really create this Amazon octopus.

41:40To say the very least, let's talk about Amazon Web Services. I love the part of the book where you describe how this became a thing. every time they would stand up a new vertical or open a new division. And people forget what it was like in the 90s and early 2000s before there was an AWS. You had to go out and buy a couple of hundred servers and a lot of software engineers to put this together and to manage it. And then you had to build like you were reinventing the wheel every time there was a new startup. Tell us about how Andy Jassy kind of looked at this and said, hey, why don't we just do this once and scale it for ourselves and maybe someone else will want to buy the excess from us.

42:24Yeah, so Andy Jassy, who's the CEO today, started at Amazon a little bit before the IPO. So he's been there from the early days. Amazon's retail business was expanding so rapidly and they had so much data and they needed so much computing power that they were continuously adding that to their own business and they got good at it. Jeff and Andy and a few other people started figuring out like, hey, yeah, we're a retail company, but we're also good at this technology stuff. If we need this, other companies probably also need this as they explore expanding online. So they productized it. They created a company called Amazon Web Services.

42:55It was very iffy as to whether this would take off. They didn't dedicate a ton of resources to it at the beginning. Andy remembers sheepishly asking for like a few dozen employees to work on it with him and thought that was like a big deal. Standalone, if this were to be split off from Amazon, would be one of the biggest tech companies in the world on its own. And one of the biggest sources of profits for Amazon as well. An enormous source of profits. So they start out with storage. They start out, they add computes. They add a number of different services that just allow anybody, you don't have to go buy a bunch of servers.

43:29And that really led to an enormous adoption cycle by a lot of tech startups, a lot of small companies that, hey, you don't need$100 million worth of junk. It's two guys on a laptop and you can launch a business. And also a lot of their competitors, a lot of their fiercest competitors, Netflix, Apple, use AWS. The CIA uses AWS, right? So this is a really entrenched business product for them. And it's very sticky. Once you're on it, you don't really leave. So it's kind of interesting what happens in other areas of Amazon where there's supposed to be a Chinese wall between you as a customer of their corporate services and the rest of their business.

44:08But you describe time and time again in the book how that Chinese wall really doesn't exist. Anybody has access to everything throughout the company. Let's talk a little bit about Marketplace. All right. So originally, Amazon Chase eBay launched an auction site. It actually failed. And the pivot was to Marketplace. Hey, let's bring in third-party sellers of stuff rather than auctions, just selling it at standard prices. That's now more than half of the business? It's more than 60 % of their retail sales. Wow, that's amazing. So that becomes wildly successful. But all of these small businesses that sell in Marketplace, they haven't been very happy with how Marketplace works.

44:51Tell us what's going on. Yeah, they have this uncomfortable situation of selling on Marketplace, relying on it for their income. But then also seeing a lot of their products that they've gone to great lengths to use R &D to create showing up in very similar versions on Amazon's private label side of the business called Amazon Basics or Amazon Essentials. And for years, they've alleged that Amazon stole my idea. And Amazon has always very vocally refuted that notion. They say, you know, there's firewalls. We would never copy our own sellers. And they've disputed that. And I was able to get documentation and find the receipts that they've been doing this for a very long time.

45:29So let's put a little flesh on that. So Amazon is both the platform to these third-party sellers as well as an original competitor, not merely selling other people's products but creating their own. Anything that's a hot seller on Amazon, they are aware of through their own data. and they look at it, they look at the margin, they figure out how cheaply can we make this and how much do we want to go after this. They've been pretty aggressive about that, haven't they? They have. I mean, the documents that I was given shows how they reverse engineer these best-selling products. And they have everything from the number of items sold to the cost to sell them, to the number of returns, to the margins.

46:11There's 25 different fields that the employees on the private label side of the company who have been told you probably shouldn't be doing this. There's policies in place at Amazon that are essentially not enforced. And because they're afraid of losing their jobs and not hitting their numbers, they've often resorted to looking over the fence and taking this type of data to reverse engineer best-selling hits because it makes them look good and it keeps their jobs. And Amazon even under oath told Congress that they were not doing this. Really? Yes. Under oath. And yet it's pretty obvious they've been doing this and doing it for a long time.

46:43Let's talk a little bit about Alexa and how they set up a venture fund that was very different than the typical venture fund. Tell us a little bit about what's going on with voice and Alexa inside of Amazon. Amazon was one of the pioneers of this voice technology and these voice-assisted robots. And as such, they set up this VC arm called the Alexa Fund. And what I learned was that a pattern played out. They'd have all of these CEOs and founders pitch them on getting money and seed investments for their companies. And under the auspices of either getting an investment or being bought by Amazon's M &A arm, they'd share all of their proprietary data.

47:22Things like, you know, their patents, their technologies, all the stuff that companies go to great lengths to keep secret because they think they're getting an investment. And time and time again, Amazon would take that information, bring the heads of different Amazon businesses to these meetings to learn from it, and then ghost them. and introduced the same exact product from an Amazon brand months later. You talk about the firewalls and the VCs, and one entrepreneur is in a meeting with a bunch of people. Hey, who are those guys? I know who you are. Who are these guys? And it turns out they're the product heads that are going to be making the competing product.

48:00It's really the – I like the VC quote, Amazon is a wolf in wolf's clothing. Like there's a very, really not even a big attempt to hide it. A different part of the book describes an entrepreneur where there are people in the room with their arms closed looking bored and like not usual venture capital behavior if you're really interested in this technology. They eventually figure out this is just a FB9. A fishing expedition. Yeah. That was no both. Fishing is too kind. you call it specifically VC espionage. Talk a little bit about how misleading even the NDAs were, the non-disclosure agreement. Oh my God, this was galling to me as a deal geek who covered M &A.

48:47I asked some of these founders I spoke to for the book to send me all the documents that Amazon gave them prior to these meetings. And I read them very thoroughly and found something called a residuals clause buried in the legalese. And it basically said that anything retained in the memories of Amazon executives at these meetings where proprietary stuff is being disclosed could be used by Amazon in their own business without any legal repercussion. So it's a license to steal. So essentially, and I keep coming back to this from the original D.E. Shaw issue, the culture at Amazon, they hired senior lawyers from some of the best firms.

49:24It seems like ethics is completely irrelevant. It seems like this is a group of rogue capitalists who are just rapacious in their greed, regardless of ethics and business standards, they're just operating in a gray zone of legality, but in a very black and white zone of ethics. These are bad people doing bad things. The interesting thing is so many of my sources for this book are the people doing the bad things. Because once they take a step back from Amazon and they realize how this company pushed them to their breaking point, that it made them do things that they would not have done at a company that was not so cutthroat, they feel bad.

50:06Well, they should. They have a guilty conscious because they did really bad things for the money. They could feel bad about it after the fact. But let's be blunt. They had big stock options and reasonable pay packages. And if you're coming over from a top 20 law firm where you're giving up a seven-figure job, you're doing it because you have the chance to make 10 figures in your stock options. So I feel bad that they feel bad. Not really. They did bad things because they were in for the money and they realized the trade-off wasn't worth it. Sell your soul for a few bucks, you still made a deal with the devil.

50:42I would agree with you. And that's the one thing I wanted to depict in this book is the human toll of that. I mean, when I was reporting out that chapter you're just describing, the founders that would cry to me on the phone about what happened to their companies, how Amazon just decimated them. It was really hard reporting, just as a journalist, like internalized a lot of that, that this company that didn't need to do these things to win chose to. And it cost people their jobs, their livelihoods, their technologies. At what cost? Let's talk a little bit about diapers.com and what was the parent company?

51:12Quizby? Quizby. So this is kind of interesting. Amazon can't figure out how to ship diapers quickly, right? And moms are a giant demographic in retail. I think the book says they make 84 % of the consumer spending decisions in the household. Like, you win the moms, you win retail. And these guys have figured out how to have diapers arrive next day. They figured out how to reach moms, and Amazon decides to go after them. And they start predatory pricing, selling diapers 20 % below cost, which one would think is illegal, isn't that? Yeah, it's the definition of predatory pricing. It's 2010, Jeff Bezos becomes laser-focused on Quidsy, which is started by these two entrepreneurs that are like the first people in their families to even go to college, right?

52:04These are homegrown talent, Mark Laurie and Vinny Barrara, right? And he puts together a team to essentially spy on them and figure out how they do it. And Amazon starts to really cut the prices of their own diapers 30%. They cut the price of their diapers so much that they start losing$200 million a month just on diapers according to internal documents. That's$2.2 billion a year on diapers alone. Because they were so threatened by this little startup in New Jersey. Right. And Amazon eventually makes a buyout offer to this firm. But they don't want to do it because they're doing so well. They think they could IPO one day.

52:39So they turn them down. So then Amazon ratchets up the heat, cuts price of diapers more, creates this loyalty program to incentivize moms to shop with Amazon, not Quidsy. And it becomes to the point where it's untenable for the Quidsy people. They start missing their internal numbers. They have to start considering a sale, unfortunately. They're really crestfallen about that. Amazon's one of the biggest players in the space. They even have to consider an offer from the person that did this to them. So they're at this private dinner with Amazon executives discussing this offer. They don't want to sell to Amazon.

53:10And Mark Lurie's BlackBerry at the time gets an email pop up and it's an offer from Walmart. And they're excited. For like$100 million more than the five and change. Exactly. $550 Amazon had offered. It's a higher offer and it's not the company that's destroyed them. So they go in the hallway, they discuss it, and they say, let's take this Walmart offer. They go back into the room with the Amazon executives. They say, hey, just want to let you know we got this offer. It's better for our shareholders. We're going to go in this direction. And they're told by a senior Amazon executive, okay, you go ahead and do that.

53:41And we're going to cut the price of our diapers to zero. That seems legal, right? We're going to give our diapers away to put you out of business and prevent you from selling to our competitor, Walmart. Right. And the people in that room knew that if Walmart had decided to acquire Quidzy and Amazon put them out of, you know, created this pricing war that they were selling diapers for either zero or like a dollar. Material change in fact, elements that would lead to the deal falling apart. Walmart could back away from the deal. It was scot-free. So they were forced to sell to their main competitor who put them in this position.

54:13And this created generational wealth for those two men who didn't even go for a drink to celebrate because they were so upset. Now, what did they end up doing in the future post that purchase? Oh, they shut it down. They shut down Quincy. They just took all the clients. They took the list. It ran for a few years. And then eventually was folded in. The two guys who created Quitsy, did they do anything else in the future? Yeah, Mark Lurie went on to start a company called Jet.com. He sold that to Walmart, buys it for a very significant sum. A couple of billion bucks. He now owns, if you live in New York, there's a place called Wonder, this restaurant company.

54:48That's his. I actually really like Wonder. So he's doing that now. So, I mean, he's gone on to do really big things. So the fascinating thing is after being forced to sell the diapers.com company to Amazon, Jet.com became essentially the back end of all of Walmart online retailing. So I want to say he got a little bit of payback. Whether or not he put as much pain to Amazon as Amazon put to him is arguable. but it was pretty obvious. And you make it clear in the book, he was, imagine getting bought for $550 million and leaving dejected. I know. It's kind of amazing. It is. It really is. I mean, I just, I think it speaks to like the pain and suffering they went through with this M &A battle.

55:37One of the things that kind of shocked me, you mentioned what a difficult place to work. Amazon is, they even backload their stock options. Your stock options like if you work at Google or somewhere else, you get stock options and they'll vest in three years and you could start selling. At least that's what it used to be. I don't know what it is these days, but they backloaded. It's 5-15. Year three is 40 % of your stock options. Year four is 40%. You really have to stick it out, don't you? Yeah. And that creates this pernicious cycle. The average white collar employee at Amazon lasts a year and a half because of the culture.

56:16So most of them leave their stock options on the table. But if you want to get your full payout, you have to survive. You have to not be part of that bottom 6%. And that creates that pressure cooker of an environment that I talk about. So let's ask the question about the big question. Is Amazon a monopoly? Have they remade corporate power in their own image? And what sort of antitrust enforcement might we expect in the future? Well, governments around the world, including our government have said it is a monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit last year saying it's an illegal monopoly.

56:49And the lawsuit says it could be broken up. What about Europe? They've been pretty strict about Amazon as well. The EU was way ahead of us on policing our own giants. Marguerite Vester was looking into Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple years ago, and people thought she was crazy. Right. So we're recording this a week before the election. We don't know what the outcome is going to be. But it appears that no matter who wins, Amazon's going to stay in the FTC's crosshairs because Lena Kahn works for the Biden-Harris administration. The assumption is if Harris wins, she continues. And Trump really dislikes Bezos because of his ownership of the Washington Post and has said Amazon should be broken up.

57:35What's it like inside the lobbying arm of Amazon heading into this election? You know, it's really fascinating. I don't know which administration they would want to win. They had a really painful four years under Trump where he was just berating them online every day, alleging that Jeff Bezos was using the Washington Post as a political tool to attack him. The Amazon Washington Post. The Amazon Washington Post. That should be a lobbyist, according to him. So that was like super painful. But then the Biden administration came in where they had good connections. And that was even more painful in some ways.

58:09You know, Biden chooses Lena Kahn to be the head of the FTC. She brings forward the lawsuit against Amazon for being a monopoly. So either way, it's not like a really great outcome for that company. You know, the interesting thing about the antitrust enforcement against Microsoft in the 90s was just having that enforcement hanging over their head was enough to allow all these small companies to get out from under. You know, every startup had to deal with the question, every software startup, hey, what's going to prevent Microsoft from just building these features into Office or into Windows? And it was really challenging.

58:47The antitrust enforcement seemed to have forced them to behave better. And that, you know, that was the Cambrian explosion of dot coms. Might we see something similar with Amazon? Might online retail expand from the 40 % market share Amazon has elsewhere if this antitrust work is enforced? You know, the big question is, will this FTC suit have a chilling effect on the way Amazon behaves? I would say they have more competition these days. Timu and Shein are, you know, these low-cost Chinese marketplaces. But I don't see any changes to the way Amazon is operating. You know, Andy Jassy, there's a scoop in the book.

59:25He's telling his deputies, you know, around the same time that they have this historic lawsuit against them for being too big, that they should be so much bigger. He tells them we should be a$10 trillion company. OK, so how do you get to$10 trillion when you're$2 trillion? It's competing the way you've been competing. Supersizing it. And since we're talking about antitrust enforcement, it's kind of fascinating that the entire—we've had 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement dating back to the Reagan administration and Judge Bork, who was one of the big advocates of moving away from historical antitrust enforcement.

1:00:06You describe in the book, Lena Kahn is a 27-year-old law student at Yale. She writes a law review paper on how much Amazon is a monopoly. And when was the last time a law review paper went viral like this? This completely upended what was going on. Tell us a little bit about Lena Kahn. Yeah, she was this law school student at Yale where actually Bork had been a professor. And she writes this seminal law review article saying that the antitrust laws, the way that they're being interpreted partially because of Bork, are failing customers and consumers in the U.S. And that Amazon is the prime example of this, that Amazon is a monopoly.

1:00:47And it's allowed to be a monopoly because we're not enforcing our antitrust laws the way that they were first derived. And this might be the only time that a law review article goes viral. Millions of people read this thing, including legislators, CEOs. It gets picked up by the New York Times, right? It becomes this like zeitgeist type of movement. It's the first time that people start equating this company with the smile on the box with potentially being a monopoly. And she starts to, with this other band of trust busters, start to reshape this moment in time about whether antitrust laws are failing Americans.

1:01:21She makes the point that the way Amazon has become a monopoly and abuses its platform power is very reminiscent of what we saw under Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Tell us a little bit about some of the abusive uses of their power that manifest in their growth. Yeah, so she points to predatory pricing, that Amazon was undercutting the market in those early days in order to steal share from rivals and put them out of business. She also says they're like a utility, that this isn't a company that you might want to work with. You sort of have to work with them if you want to reach shoppers. And that has power over the sellers on their website where they could jack up fees.

1:02:01It has power over lots of different competitors that feel like they're forced to work with their main rival in order to access markets. Share a lot of data, a lot of information they would rather not. As well as buy advertising from them. Advertising is another area. In the book, you talk about how when Amazon enters into the marketplace with a competitive product, they shut off their competitors' ability to advertise that product. They do. And that's, you know, advertising has become so core to being successful as a seller on Amazon.com because there's millions of other sellers, that flywheel, that if you don't buy advertising, you're not showing up in search.

1:02:36And what did Amazon do? Roku, which makes a competing device for them for streaming TV. All of a sudden, they can't buy ads anymore. You know, this happened across the devices space. And so the antitrust law is, hey, if you want to be a platform, you can be a platform. If you want to be a retailer, you can be a retailer, but you can't tie your platform advertising into reducing the competitiveness of your products versus other people. Well, that's what the Congress was alleging, that if you can't own the world's biggest online platform and also compete on it, that it has to be one or the other.

1:03:07Spin out that separate business and do that. The FTC lawsuit's a little bit different. She alleges that actually in this current forum, Amazon's become the monopoly. They don't have to do predatory pricing anymore. They could actually exert their power on their sellers. A decade ago, the average seller on Amazon gave 19 cents on the dollar back to Amazon in fees. Today, that's 45 cents on the dollar. That's unbelievable. And that means those sellers have had to raise the price of their goods to cover Amazon's margin. Or reduce their own margin. Or reduce their own margin. And the FTC lawsuit says, because Amazon's so big and they require those sellers to also have the lowest price on Amazon, that they have to raise the price on Target.com and Walmart.com and on and on and on.

1:03:47And it's created higher prices for all of us. So are you an Amazon Prime member? Do you use Amazon? We have a Prime account because my husband watches football and they have Thursday night football. We don't really shop on it, though. You don't? Very rarely. That's really interesting. All right. Let's jump to our favorite questions. We ask all of our guests, starting with, so what are you streaming these days? What are you either listening to on Audible? What are you watching on Amazon Prime or Netflix or Apple Plus? What's keeping you entertained besides Thursday Night Football? I watched Nobody Wants This.

1:04:20That was very good. Charming. Really, really good. I listened to My Favorite Murder. It's a true crime podcast. I'm a murderino, they call it. Tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career. Oh, gosh. I have so many of them. Joanne Lublin, who was this dynamo at The Wall Street Journal. Dana Similuka, my former boss at The Wall Street Journal and M &A. Jamie Heller, who's now the CEO of Business Insider. Dennis Berman, who is an amazing M &A reporter at The Journal. And Drew Dowell, I would say, who he's now overseas for us. Let's talk about books. What are your favorites? What are you reading right now?

1:04:54So some of my favorites are The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It's like one of the first Victorian detective mysteries. I love the Brontes and Jane Austen. I know that's like pretty trite. I'm reading some just fun Halloween type of books right now. This book called Lucy Foley called The Midnight Feast. That's been really fun. And I love Sally Rooney. I have her new book ready to read after this one. All right. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either journalism, M &A, retail? What's your advice? journalism it's i mean you have to hustle um i would say it's to get as many bylines as you can even if it's not at one of the prestige newspapers at first i i fully believe the way i got hired at journal was freelancing my college papers my college you know articles to other places to get a byline in places in tiny newspapers that probably don't exist anymore and you just have to be reporting around you all the time making sources wherever you are keeping a great rolodex So I think that's the most important thing you could do.

1:05:59And what do you know about the world of journalism today? You wish you knew 20 years or so ago when you were first starting out. Oh, my gosh. When I first started out,.com was like not even that much of a thing, right? You know, WSJ.com was this like bastard stepchild, right? And that's what I was put on, actually. I think I wish I knew that you just have to be so resilient in this profession that if you're doing your job well, it means a lot of rejection that you're going to cold call people and they're going to hang up on you. And that's fine. Cold call the next one. You just get up again and get up again because so much of journalism is a numbers game.

1:06:41Really, really interesting. Thank you, Dana, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Dana Mattioli. She covers Amazon for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of the book The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 500 or so previous discussions we've had over the past 10 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcast. And be sure and check out my new short forum podcast, At The Money, short conversations with experts about single topics that affect your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it at The Money in the Masters in Business feed or wherever you find your favorite podcast.

1:07:33I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my Head of Research. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the Head of Podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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