Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Amazon’s Quest For World Domination with Dana Mattioli

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with the Wall Street Journal’s veteran Amazon reporter, Dana Mattioli. Dana’s brand-new book "The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power,” tells the inside story of Amazon’s rise to becoming one of the world’s most powerful and feared companies.  Dana exposes what’s really happening behind the doors of “The Everything Store,” and shares why the FTC’s Monopoly lawsuit could be the most damning business story we’ve ever seen…  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is open. book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're

enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the point. so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Amazon, is it a monopoly? The FTC seems to think so, having filed a lawsuit against the company last year. In what could become one of the largest antitrust cases of the 21st century, veteran Amazon reporter Dana Madioli takes us through all we need to know, from Amazon's growth as a Wall Street darling to its drive for domination in becoming the everything. store. Let's get to it. So joining us now, Dana Madyoli, and you know I love that name, Madioli. You just know I love that name, Dana. She's a reporter covering Amazon for the Wall Street Journal. She's got a book coming out, The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World

and remake corporate power. Wow. You know, it's an awesome book on a number of different fronts because it is a, this is a Greek book to me. This is a book about climbing Mount Olympus. taking no prisoners on the way up, and you want to dislodge Zeus. I mean, that's basically what I read in this book. When I closed the book, I said, okay, this is people that were nerdy, and they had a good idea, and it wasn't working in the beginning. Then it started working. And then, oh, my God, then it became unbelievably good.

And then they got a little crazy. And I think that happens to everybody in life. So let's start there. It's great to have you. Brilliant book. How did you come to cover Amazon for the Wall Street Journal? Why don't we start there? Sure.

So I was the Wall Street Journal's mergers and acquisitions reporter for six years. And in that role, you know, my job is to break news on which companies you're getting acquired. And something that really struck me over those six years was that Amazon was being invoked in conversations far flung from retail. The retail CEOs weren't just nervous about them. A lot of CEOs started getting nervous. And this became like the most feared company in America across boardrooms, across industries. My bankers were talk about them. And companies, started doing some defensive M&A to try to bulk up and to ward this giant off, you know, Amazon proofing their businesses, for instance. And when I was transitioning off of that beat, which I really loved, I said, how am I going to find anything better than M&A? And Amazon still seemed like this black box to me. They were deliberately secretive. They tried to hide their business practices.

And that to me was such a challenge and I wanted to get inside of it. Okay. So you have this remarkable journey. Okay, you know, Jeff Bezos starts out, and no disrespect to Jeff Bezos, because I do respect him and he's one of the richest people in the world of not the richest. But he starts out as a garden variety, nerdy engineer at a hedge fund, a fantastic hedge fund, by the way, D.E. Shaw. And he gets this idea that he's going to sell books. He doesn't really want to just sell books. And I'll talk to you about my interaction with Jeff Bezos in a second, and I'll get your reaction.

So tell us about this journey. So I think what's important to note is that Jeff didn't really come up with this idea fully by himself. David Shaw, who's brilliant, the head of D.E. Shaw, was ahead of the curve on all things internet. This is, you know, 1994. Most people didn't have a computer. The people using the internet were like scientists, nerdy academics, people like David. And he thought this could be commercialized. So he tasked Bezos with looking into the idea of selling things on the internet. So Bezos spent months looking into this for David, for DeShod, and maybe profit from. And he comes to realize that this is like a major opportunity in and of itself. And he leaves the firm to start up Amazon.

And, you know, the rest is history. But what's brilliant here is he was able to get two really lucky breaks that without them, I don't know if Amazon even exists at all or definitely not in its current form. Once the IPO, he is able to convince Wall Street, he and his CFO at the time, that they shouldn't be measured by the traditional metrics of other retailers, that we don't have to show profits, that we're going to grow, grow, grow, steal share along the way, and you're going to be patient with us. And without that, you know, some former senior employees at the time

question whether there's an Amazon. And they were also able to exploit the sales tax loophole that was just so important in an age of comparison shopping where they didn't charge sales tax in very many states, some of them until 2017. Can you imagine that where everyone else had to charge? them. Yeah. So they had this advantage. So I'll give you my Jeff Bezos story. Please. And you react to the story. I'm at the Sun Valley Conference, the Allen & Company Conference. It is the year 2000.

This is the turn of the millennium. And Mr. Bezos is giving a presentation. And he's my age. I mean, literally, I'm born on the 6th of January. He's born on the 12th. So he's six days younger than me, Dana. And we're only separated by about $250 billion of net worth. Okay. give you a sense for who we are. And I'm fascinated by his presentation. He says, listen, I'm, I'm selling books. You don't judge me as a bookseller. These books are roughly the same size. They're roughly the same weight. I'm trying to dot-plot the country and to figure out where to put warehouses for logistical purposes. And the best way to do that is to sell a book. That's why I can figure out demographically where to put things. And I'm eventually going to sell everything.

So you're judging me as a bookstore, but you shouldn't judge me as a bookstore. You should judge me as a, you know, an up-and-coming Walmart on the internet. Basically is what he said. And it's a brilliant exposition. I write down all these notes. They say, I'm going to go buy Amazon. The next speaker is a gentleman by the name of Warren Buffett. Buffett comes on and says, that was a lovely conversation from Jeff Bezos. But can you believe his company is worth more than Sears Roebuck, the storied retailer Sears Roebuck. And Sears Roebuck has all this hard assets. And all he's got is this Silicon Ether. And he just told you that he's never going to make any money. He was making that pitch back then. And so I ripped up my notes. I never bought Amazon. Now, of course,

if you bought Amazon at that time, a $10,000 investment was worth $14 million. So I missed that one, Dana. But the point I'm making is that he had something, but it wasn't always 100% clear it was going to go in this direction. So tell us from your research, what were a few things that he did with his team to make it go in the direction it ultimately went into? First of all, I wish I would have spoken to you for my book, that would have been a great anecdote. Yeah. Well, look, it doesn't reflect well on me because I misjudged the whole situation, taking on the advice of Mr. Buffett, who now admits that he, too, misjudged the situation. Yeah. Well, I think that's really indicative of where Jeff's mind was from the very beginning.

There's a scene in the book that I really think encapsulates how he was playing, you know, chess when everyone else is playing checkers. It's 2006. All these retail CEOs are meeting for this big gala. It's all the top CEOs in the industry, people like the CEO of Sackswood Avenue and Bacy's and Diane Van Furstenberg, right? And it's the same people year to year. And then Jeff walks in. He's never been invited before. No one views him as an apparel retailer. No one thinks that the shopper's ever going to buy her clothes on Amazon like gross, right? So they underestimate him. And one of my sources sees him at the bar and he says, you know, what are you doing here? And Jeff replies, your margin is my opportunity. It was never just about books. To your point.

books was the entry point. And it was never even just about retail. Yeah. It started with retail. And that was the canary in the coal mine. But if you look at where they've ascended, they are the top cloud computing company in the world. They're one of the top digital advertisers. They're a grocer, a podcast studio.

The top logistics giant in the U.S. unseating UPS, which was made a hundred years ago, right? So it never stopped there. And there is this aggressive push to get to the top of any industry they can touch. Yeah. Yeah, well, well said. And so another quick story, do you remember Joy Covey? Does that name sound familiar to you? The CFO. Yeah. So Joy Covey was in my law school class. And so she was a joint graduate. She went to Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School. And I would say to you that Joy Covey was perhaps the nicest person that I had come in contact with in law

school. And of course, she went on to work at Cliner Perkins, and they installed her as a CFO. And then you, of course, you have the legendary Frank Quantrone, a fellow Italian, who helped take the company public. And, of course, Joy, unfortunately, was hit by a bicycle, as you recall. I believe it was in 2013, right? Yeah. She was hit by a car while she was biking. Died tragically. But this is an amazing story.

I want to switch gears and talk about Lena Kahn for a second. She's a 27-year-old law school student. She's at Yale Law School. She writes in the Yale Law School Journal in 2017, at age 27. that Amazon is a monopoly. Tell us what happens next. Yeah, she's got a remarkable rise. She writes this incendiary paper for a lost school student saying that Amazon's a monopoly and the current antitrust laws are not equipped to rein in these digital giants, these digital monopolies. And she came to that conclusion when she was working at a place called Open Markets in D.C. when she was right out of college. And she sort of researched Amazon in the margins for a few years while she was at Yale law. And this paper just went by, which is kind of crazy for a law journal article. Usually, you know, academics read them, but, you know, Elizabeth Warren's reading them. People start writing about them in the Washington Post and the New York Times. This article just gets this crazy reader base. And it starts making people connect the dots between Amazon, which is a darling at the time. People associated with fast free shipping, a smile on the box, with maybe having too much power. People start using the word monopoly in the same sentence. People start questioning, is it fair that they run the world. biggest e-commerce platform, but they compete on it? Do they have their finger on this scale? What are they doing with all the data? And she just has this meteoric rise. So from there, she becomes the face of

the new trust busters. She is a lawyer on Congress's investigation into big tech, including Amazon, where they determine that all four of the big tech companies are monopolies. And then, kind of miraculously, in 2021, President Biden picks her to be the head of the FTCS chair, the youngest in in the agency's 100-year history. And, you know, it's kind of like Joe Biden picked Amazon's Ida Tarbell to run the agency regulating it. It's interesting, right? And also they're bringing a lawsuit against Apple. So, so the, you know, listen, I took antitrust law 35 years ago, and this is sort of bizarre. But one of the first things that Trump says to me in the White House, on my first day, I walk into the Oval Office, he's sitting in the study off the Oval Office. I passed through the

oval into the study. He's wearing his orange bifocles. He never lets anybody see him in those because he can't read without him. And he looks at me and he says angrily, he says, can we break up Amazon? I hate this son of a bitch, Jeff Bezos, and I hate the Washington Post. Can we break up Amazon? I look at him as a look, I don't know if we can break up Amazon or not. I mean, I haven't read those laws in a long time. But can we break up Amazon, Dana? Well, the FTC is trying to. In September, Lena Khan and the FTC filed a lawsuit saying that Amazon is this monopoly. And if they are successful, and we won't know for a while, it's not going to go to court until 2026. But if they're successful, there's a chance that Amazon, as we know it, does not exist in this current form.

And you could believe that Amazon is fighting this tooth and nail because the current form that it's in serves it very well. This giant octopus with all of its tentacles is really its secret sauce. You know, so listen, I mean, I think it's good for America. And my buddies and tech are not going to like this. But when you have six, seven, eight companies that are controlling the entire economy, it has never been good for America, whether we're standard oil, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft in the year 2000, it's never good for America. And so what happens is the great thing about capitalism is that we can grow companies like this, but we have to be mindful of it. And by splitting them up, we create more innovation. And I'll just remind all my tech buddies that the split up of AT&T enabled them to be who they are today because it unleashed all that innovation. It lowered the cost of telecommunications. It broadened broadband and all these other things. So just something to just something to think about. So your guess, they split up Amazon. And if they do split it up, what does it get split up into? What are the components that it would be? Okay. So it's tough question because the FTC is trying to go back. Well, Lena Kahn's FTC is trying to go back to

a reinterpretation of antitrust in the pre-Bork years before there was a change in thinking about what antitrust purpose was. For the last 40 years, people thought it was about consumer welfare or low prices for consumers. By that standard, Amazon was able to grow because it marketed itself as this low-price platform. But this FTC is bringing forward cases based on more dormant legal theories from before Bork. And they've lost. They've lost a lot. So if you look at their lawsuit to try to block Facebook from buying Meadow Within, based on a very nascent legal theory, it lost. They tried to block Microsoft Activision. They lost. What's really interesting to me about this Amazon lawsuit, though, is that it's careful. It's kind of borky and it's based on consumer

welfare. It's based on Amazon allegedly raising prices for customers, not only on Amazon.com, but throughout the entire online economy because they have that much asymmetric power. So to me, that gives them a better chance of winning. And from antitrust experts I've spoken to, they also agree with that. And if it were to win, I mean, there could be a scenario, for instance, where Amazon's not allowed to own this major logistics network that it forces sellers to use to be part of Prime. So maybe UPS and FedEx get more of those deliveries. So I don't think that would be a huge disruption to you and me getting our boxes on our stoops, right? But that would be, you know, very different for Amazon to deal with.

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Mr. Bezos today. Okay, nerdy guy, very thin, balding, premature baldness, nerdy guy. Now, he looks like a Marvel superhero. So he's jacked up, just turned 60 like I did. It looks like he's in the best shape of his life. What happened to Jeff Bezos over the years? I think Jeff now is the manifestation of who he thought he was supposed to be back then. So there's some anecdotes in the book where even though his physical appearance wouldn't really match the words I'm about to tell you, it kind of lines up now. So early on it's like 1994. It's Jeff and a few of his early engineers are talking in the middle of the workday. And these guys really were idealists.

They wanted to change the world with Amazon.com. No one thought it would be this big. And they wanted to democratize reading. And Jeff from what the people in the room told me kind of looks at them with derision. says, you know, you guys don't have this killer mentality. And he was like kind of angry about that, right? And I think if you look at Jeff now, he definitely has that killer mentality. You know, the stories about him being Machiavelli and you could see it. Like, right? It's kind of like a physical manifestation. And I think he's sort of grown into the power.

Do you think power changes people, Dana? You know, I get raised Catholic. Perhaps you got raised Catholic. We're always reminded as Catholics that we return back to dust and so that we shouldn't probably get ourselves too revved up on earth. But in my life, because I deal with people that are very rich, and I've also dealt with people that are very powerful because I ended up accidentally in politics, I find that the power does something to people. And I'm not necessarily thinking I like it. But what do you think? Do you think power changes people? And does it change them for the better or for the worse? Or maybe it's just an acceleration of their personalities? I don't know. Yeah, I do. And I think a culture that's driven by this endless need for power really warps people.

It's funny on the dust reference. Jeff Bezos often talks to his employees, which rank in the millions, more than a million, that they have a day one culture, which means they always have to be scrappy, start-appy, and like stealing share, right? Even if you're the $2 trillion girl are in the room, right? And he says that day two is detritus. It's death, right? And as part of that, to ward off day two, they have this really unforgiving culture where every year, bottom six percent, no matter how well they're doing is cut.

their comp is backloaded, their RSUs are years three and four. So this creates this like almost hunger game scenario where you have to outperform to survive so you're not cut versus your other Harvard or Stanford colleagues, right? So this creates this competitive environment. And what I found in the book when we get to like the anti-competitive behaviors is I think a lot of that is driven by this culture where you need to have more power, you need to get more share, you need to get more revenues. You always have to be moving forward to stay away from day two that you might be tempted to do things that are maybe outside of the realms of what's acceptable and antitrust. Okay, really well said. Okay, so I'm at the point in this interview where I have five words or names, Dana, and I give them out to my authors and then they have to respond.

And so I'm going to think of a name and then you can give me a sentence or a word or something. Okay, you ready? I'm ready. Monopoly. I think of Lina Khan and I think of John Cantor at the DOJ and how they're trying to reform and bring back antitrust. Is that good for America or bad for America? You know, I think it could be. This has caused some really big conflicts within those agencies, especially the FTC, where people think Khan's agenda is going too far, right?

But the antitrust laws are very vaguely worded. There's a lot open for interpretation. Okay. So, you know, I'm a capitalist. I love my country. And I want there to be Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. God bless them. They can make hundreds of billions of dollars. But we've got to be very careful about the concentration of power at the top because it creates a lot of bad outcomes for the country. You know, remember we want everybody in the country to do well, not just the people at the top. And you have to allow that to happen through market forces. Otherwise, we're going to have a big disaster on our hands. I don't want to see AOC as the president, Dana. That's me personally. Okay. Let's go to the FTC, those three letters, Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Trade Commission, I think of, you know, a really prestigious agency that has sort of the weight of the world on its shoulders. They have to set the agenda on competition, but it's also going through a shake-up right now. Okay. Andy Jassy.

So Andy Jassy is Amazon's new CEO. He was a Bezos protege. And I think something that we dug up in the book that really just shows his mindset is, here is that in the midst of all these antitrust lawsuits against the company where they're trying to curb its power. Andy recently told his top executives that Amazon could be a $10 trillion company. So they're not stopping. They think there's $8 trillion worth of growth. So I think that says everything you need to know about Amazon. Okay. Let's go to Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos. Complicated. I think he is no doubt a genius. He revolutionized the way that we shop,

the vernacular of American, you know, corporate business. But I also think with the power that Amazon has, there have been unintended consequences. Does he ever return to Amazon? I mean, I know he's a chairman and everything like that, but I mean, really return to Amazon. He's spending more of his time on space. But that's where the majority of his time is right now. Okay. So you're worth several hundred billion dollars. You can probably do whatever you want, right? So it doesn't return Amazon. I would say so. I don't think so. The word Amazon, which was almost relentless, right? The company's name is almost relentless. The word Amazon. I would say it's like one of the last multinational conglomerates. There's no modern analog. People equated to modern day standard

oil. And I think that's largely right. Well, what's next for you, Dana? What are you going to be writing next? I am going to be writing about big tech writ large, more like on investigations into tech companies. So if you ever have any tips, I'd love to hear them. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm I'm on the periphery, though. I'm really not a tech guy as much as I own some of these stocks. And I'm obviously a big consumer of Amazon. I think there's a box that comes to the Scaramucci family once a day, which is more reason, Dana, why I should have bought that stock 25 years ago. So I can participate in some of the profits. But I actually want to hear your Trump stories from the White House. I mean, we have some really fun ones in the book about Trump's animosity toward Bezos about, you know, Peter Navarro calling him a sociopath. Yeah, he doesn't like Bezos because Bezos, he believes, is the editorial chief of the Washington Post because he owns it. So he feels like he's the one that's writing all the negative articles about him. Right, which is not true.

Well, we both know that that's not true. And what I never could figure out about these politicians is the baby nature of them. You know, I've had miserable stories written about me in the Wall Street Journal. I've had miserable stories written about me in Bloomberg. I think the New York Post parodies me. I mean, I've got like cartoon disfiguring stories about me there, but I'm a big believer in the free press, and I don't take it that seriously, particularly if you put yourself in the public domain. Yet people like Trump for some reason, it really does get under their skin. He can pretend otherwise, but it really does get under his skin. And I think it's an interesting thing about people that have power. You know, if you look at Elon Musk as an example, whatever happened with him and Don Lemon, he did not like the conversation. And so he exerted his power where he may have been better served for both actions.

and himself if he allows for these alternative voices to come on to the network and to the platform. That was shocking to me about covering this story is Jeff Bezos also very thin-skinned for someone of that stature. Yeah. Well, because you're getting every day someone telling you how great you are and how great the clothing looks, even if there's a day you show up naked, there's no one around you. You know, one of the venture capitalists one said to me, the problem is I could say a certain thing to a certain $200 billion. person and it could lead to generational wealth for me. It could lead to me living on a yacht as well. I say the wrong thing I'm excised from their community and there's no generational wealth or yacht for me. And so what happens is people can form their behavior. And so you get a lot of sycophancy and you get a lot of over flattering. But we'll see. Listen, these are phenomenal companies.

I applaud what they did. There's a dark side of this stuff. But the book is outstanding. It is a book I would recommend to anybody who wants to understand corporate interest. And this is like barbarians at the gate without the takeover, right? And the irony is that they were taking over the internet, the retail on the internet. What's their market share of retail on the internet now? Over 50? It's 40%. 40%.

So there you go. They're probably 5% of all retail and 40% of the internet retail, right? Yeah, that's right. But if you actually look at the gross value of their merchandise, it's higher. It's higher. That's just the fees they collect. All right. So here you go.

The Everything War, Dana Medioli. Thank you so much for joining us today in Open Book. Thank you for having me. I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book. For more about me, my childhood, early career, Skybridge, Bitcoin, and yes, the White House, my new book from Wall Street to the White House and back, is available for pre-order on Amazon and wherever you buy your books. Okay, so Dana provides a phenomenal eye into the journey of Amazon and its rise.

And the real question is, is it a monopoly? And the funny thing about this is that's the first thing. And of course, you remember these things. This has happened on a Friday. And I was in the White House for two Fridays. So this happened on the first Friday where Trump looked at me square in the eye and he said, I want to break up Amazon. And I looked at him. I said, well, if you read the antitrust laws, you actually can't break up Amazon because it's not technically a monopoly. But that was seven years ago. And Amazon has gained a tremendous amount of share in web services and a few other businesses. And so, I can state simply, it's definitely not a monopoly in retail. Even though it has over 50% of the internet retail that's done on the internet, it only has about five or six percent of the U.S. market share of overall retail. So it'll be interesting to see how this case unfolds, but there's a very compelling argument that there are parts of Amazon, including web services that are monopoly light. And I guess the question before our society now, what do we do with monopolies today. I've always been of the opinion that these things do need to get broken up. It unleashes

tremendous amounts of innovation when they do. But of course, if you're an Amazon stockholder, you probably don't want that to happen. But I will tell you that when AT&T was broken up in 1984, no shareholder wanted that to happen. But if you had held those baby bells, those seven companies that it split into, you did unbelievably well. So the future is bright for Amazon as a company that's conjoined or a company that's eventually or perhaps broken up by the U.S. government. You feeling better? Yeah. Okay, good.

All right, good. All right. You want to join the show? What, you got some pepper in you? You got some energy or what? You want to join the show? All right, you ready? Wait a minute.

Let me lower the TV. All right, lower the TV, okay? The 87-year-old woman without the hearing aid, living in denial. But you did teach me well because I won't wear the bifocals. See that? All right. So my guest was Dana Madyoli, a very nice Italian lady, mom. She wrote a book about Amazon.

So you don't really order that from Amazon, but you do listen to your Alexa all day, right? Yes, I do. Okay, so you like Amazon's products, right? Because it can play any music you want and turn on the radio for you, no problem, right? Absolutely. Yes, I do. Okay, so. I have people ordering for me from Amazon.

Okay, and then it gets... I don't have the right phone. Right, and then it gets shipped to your house, right? Yep. Yeah, so it's very convenient. So you like the services around Amazon, right? Yes, of course. It's the American way.

Okay, but Amazon's gotten very powerful. You remember when the phone company got broken up, when AT&T got broken up, and they split it into a couple of different companies, or you don't remember that? Yeah, vaguely, I do. Okay, and so the question now is the government's thinking that Amazon's too powerful and they may want to break it up. What do you think of that? I don't think they should. Tell me why. They've earned their power, but what about pricing?

Do you think they're still pricing things fairly? I do. You like the prices. Okay. So the government filed a lawsuit against them, suggesting that they're becoming too powerful. But you don't like that, right? You want to leave Amazon alone, right? Leave it alone.

Okay. Donald Trump got mad at the owner of Amazon because he also owns the Washington Post. He didn't like what they were writing about him. And so he pushed the breakup. Do you think Donald Trump is too sensitive, ma? Yes. Sensitive. Okay.

All right. So you're... You know, he covers it with his bullying tactics. Okay. You don't have to be bully if you're sure of yourself. Right. You don't have to act like a bully if you're sure of yourself. Isn't that right, Ma?

Absolutely, right. Right. Right. Yeah, I remember Mike Fassatelli's mother telling Trump that he was insecure. This was about 25 years ago, Mar-a-Lago. I was laughing very hard. But all right, well, here we are now. We're still dealing with him.

All right, ma. All right. Thank you, baby. All right, love you. Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast.

While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.