Let’s remember when Mackenzie Bezos negatively reviewed a book critical of Amazon, on Amazon, on this day in 2013 (November 4)
I’ve read tons of book reviews, but I don’t think I’ve ever read another review of a book about business reviewed on the pages of that business, written by the CEO’s (then-)spouse. But this is the world we live in, where Mackenzie Bezos can leave a one-star review for the book The Everything Store, by Brad Stone.
She writes in her review:
In the first chapter, the book sets the stage for Bezos’s decision to leave his job and build an Internet bookstore. “At the time Bezos was thinking about what to do next, he had recently finished the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain. So looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls ‘the regret-minimization framework’ to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.” It’s a good beginning, and it weaves in nicely with what’s to come. But it’s not true. Jeff didn’t read Remains of the Day until a year after he started Amazon.
If this were an isolated example, it might not matter, but it’s not. Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book. Like two other reviewers here, Jonathan Leblang and Rick Dalzell, I have firsthand knowledge of many of the events. I worked for Jeff at D. E. Shaw, I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history. Jeff and I have been married for 20 years.
For what it’s worth, the Bezos-owned Washington Post said The Everything Store is “the meticulously reported book [that]has plenty of gems for anyone who cares about Amazon, Jeff Bezos, entrepreneurship, leadership or just the lunacy it took to build a company in less than two decades that now employs almost 90,000 people and sold $61 billion worth of, well, almost everything last year.”
In Fortune a few months later, author Adam Lashinsky wrote:
I think I know why MacKenzie Bezos hated Brad Stone’s book about her husband and his company. It’s not because of the “numerous factual inaccuracies” she says are in the book, though she names only one, a mistiming of when Jeff Bezos read a certain influential novel, and shame on Stone for giving her that opening. No — Mrs. Bezos gave a one-star review to Stone’s outstanding book, The Everything Store, because it will make anyone who reads it, regardless of how much they love being an Amazon (AMZN) customer, feel icky about themselves for just how much they enjoy buying things at Amazon.
I published a book about Apple almost exactly two years ago, when one of the most successful non-fiction books of our time, a biography of Steve Jobs, was topping the charts. Stone’s book on Amazon and Bezos accomplishes everything I tried to do with my book as well as what Walter Isaacson did with his biography. I had next to no cooperation from Apple; Isaacson had near total cooperation from his subject. Stone’s experience falls squarely in between, and it shows. Though Bezos wouldn’t give Stone an interview, the Amazon CEO allowed numerous people in his world, including multiple key Amazon executives, to talk to Stone. The result is an authoritative, deeply reported, scoopalicious, nuanced, and balanced take that pulls absolutely no punches.
That brings me back to the ickiness that Amazon’s customers — and let’s face it, who isn’t an Amazon customer? — will experience reading this book. The portrait that Stone paints of Amazon’s founder and his company is of a ruthless, disingenuous, slave-driving mentality, where pretty much any kind of legal behavior is tolerated in the name offering customers lower prices. Stone portrays Bezos, known to viewers of Charlie Rose or Jimmy Fallon as the amiable businessman with the exuberant honk of a laugh, as an ogre given to “nutters,” the name his executives give to his frequent temper tantrums. Stone describes a business culture where partners are expendable, where companies foolish enough to take investments from Amazon come to regret the control they handed over to the retail monolith, and where competitors big and small are mere pawns on Bezos’s elaborate chessboard.
Well then.
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