‘Jeff Bezos believes people shouldn’t do jobs software can do’
‘Jeff Bezos believes people shouldn’t do jobs software
can do’
By James Dean August 27 2018, 12:01am
On the east bank of Lake Washington, across the water
from Seattle, is Medina, a town of about 3,000 people that has become a home
for tech billionaires. Among them are Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and
Jeff Bezos.
At Medina Beach park, teenagers chat at picnic tables and
dive into the lake from a bobbing pontoon dock. Jet skis and pleasure boats
skim across the glistening water as seaplanes buzz overhead. A small army of
gardeners, tree surgeons and swimming pool cleaners drift between the lakefront
mansions on Evergreen Point Road.
Medina is more country retreat than celebrity hideout.
The only hint of the great wealth here comes from the racks of cameras at the
town’s entry points, which capture the numberplates of cars as they enter and
leave, automatically logging each in a police database.
Mr Bezos owns three homes on Evergreen Point Road. In
1998 he paid $10 million for a 5.3-acre property that includes two five-bedroom
mansions. In 2010 he annexed the five-acre property next door, which featured a
six-bedroom mansion, for $53 million.
These lakefront mansions are part of Mr Bezos’s enviable
property portfolio. He bought the former Textile Museum in Washington DC for
$23 million in 2016 and turned it into a ten-bedroom private residence. He has
four adjoining apartment units at The Century, an art deco high-rise next to
Central Park in New York. He owns two properties in Beverly Hills, California.
He also owns 300,000 acres of land in Texas, including a 30,000-acre ranch. In
all, Mr Bezos owns about 400,000 acres in the US, putting him 28th on Land
Leader’s list of the nation’s top landowners.
Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen was in high school when she gave
birth to Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. Four
years later she married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, and Jeffrey Jorgensen
became Jeff Bezos. He spent a good part of his youth at his grandparents’ ranch
in south Texas, where he learned to rear cattle, fix fences, build barns and
operate farm machinery. In the fourth grade, he taught himself to program on
the school’s Teletype, which stored data by punching holes in paper tape. He
worked as a cook at McDonald’s in high school.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1987 and worked
at a financial telecoms start-up for a year before moving into banking. In 1990
he joined DE Shaw, a Wall Street hedge fund that was, unusually for the time,
using advanced computing techniques to help pick its investments — something
that gave rise to Mr Bezos’s obsession with data and metrics.
In 1993 he married MacKenzie Tuttle, a novelist, with
whom he has four children. He founded Amazon in 1994, set up Blue Origin, a
space exploration company, in 2000 and bought The Washington Post in 2013.
“The first thing that jumps out is he’s fiercely
intelligent,” Brad Stone, a biographer of Mr Bezos, said. “That shows in
Amazon’s ability to identify new markets before anyone else does. He’s also
relentless. There’s a great ambition there.” In his early years at Amazon, Mr
Bezos was “difficult in the same way that Steve Jobs [the founder of Apple]
could be,” Stone said. “He was very tough on colleagues who couldn’t meet his
high standards. Jeff is still tough but I think his leadership style has
evolved.
“He has a mindset that people shouldn’t do jobs that
software and technology can do. That mindset has led to Amazon’s amazing
success, creating an incredibly efficient organisation that displaces other
businesses. But when it comes to jobs, it has a drawback that perhaps we don’t
yet fully understand.”
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