Pivot - 'I love Amazon. Let's break it up'

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Scott joins Land of the Giants host, Jason Del Rey, live on stage at the Code Commerce conference in New York City. Scott tells Jason that Amazon needs to be broken up - and which parts of the company should be spun off first. They discuss Amazon’s ultimate impact on us as consumers, who are the companies left that can really compete with Amazon, and question the idea that we live in an era of innovation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi, everyone. Get started at HubSpot Conference in New York. It's nice to see someone read my book out loud and figure out a way to make money from it. It's a way to go, JDR. You better be threatened by Jason Del Rey. He's quiet but deadly.

Anyway, Recode podcast crossover hit. Jason is the host of the podcast Land of the Giants. It looks at the biggest tech companies of our time. In the first season, Jason looks at Amazon, where it gets its power, and what it does with that power. Jason's a really great Recode reporter, and I can't wait to hear your conversation and what you said about the company. I thought a good way to start would be for people who haven't listened somehow to the last episode of Land of the Giants,

which was in the words of sellers and big brands that do business on Amazon, talking about both opportunity, but really more and more of the challenges of doing business. And so we have a brief clip, sort of a highlight reel of some of those sellers and brands talking about what it's like dealing with Amazon's power today.

Why don't you just pull off of Amazon if it's this bad? Like, no one's forcing you to sell there. We're in too deep. Well, if you talk to Amazon sellers, they're living in fear. Their whole livelihood is at stake. You know, with a flip of a switch, their livelihood is gone. Oh, well, we're just doing what the customer wants. And I call BS on that. It's rope-a-dope. They're playing with you until the time they come in with the knockout punch. Right. When you start to actually assume that every single customer on earth wants Amazon, I don't think you're being realistic and I don't think you're being honest to your customer promise

anymore. If you woke up tomorrow and you said, I've had enough, and you pulled off, how long would your business remain viable? You know, maybe 30 seconds. I mean, there's no reason for us to exist without that channel. You can't sell toys today without selling toys on Amazon. So, a lot of happy people. How did we get here? Steve Jobs. We decided in a modern economy, as you become more educated and more affluent, your dependence upon a super being and church attendance goes down. But our questions get bigger and bigger. And in order to fill that void

between a spiritual need and a lack of spiritual figures, we need to fill it with people. And we used to fill it with athletes and government officials. Now we fill it with innovators. And so the Jesus Christ of our modern economy was a guy who denied his blood under oath to avoid child support payments when he was worth a quarter of a billion dollars. And that's Steve Jobs. And we have continued this gross idolatry of innovators that has allowed these companies to run unfettered, regardless of the tax avoidance, regardless of the job destruction, regardless

of the anti-competitive predatory behaviors, regardless of the exploitation of workers that aren't mostly white, mostly college-educated, all working at headquarters because we just think they're the new Jesus Christ. And I think finally we're starting to throw up on that notion. Did that answer your question? I mean, it was the beginning of an answer to a question. Amazon specifically, the dominant position they hold today, what do you see as the core of that?

One of the factors we explored in the series was their relationship with Wall Street. Yeah, so that's the real start. with Wall Street. Yeah. So that's the real start. Probably one of the biggest fundamental shifts in our economy is this Amazon effect, where typically what happens is the company is given some runway to lose money, and then investors in the market demand profits, at which point the profits are distributed to investors, they're taxed, and those profits are taxed.

It's kind of how our economy is set up. And Amazon, through incredible storytelling that goes back to the 1997 shareholder letter and their ability to execute against that vision, has resulted in a company that has totally changed the compact between investors and the markets, and that it has basically been allowed to go and almost break even for 25 years, while almost becoming the most valuable company in the world. I think it's the third most valuable company in the world. And our economy isn't set up for that. So what does that do? It has incredible impact and the impact is boring unfortunately so it doesn't get a lot of attention. But if we're in a boxing ring and you're getting a hundred percent

pure oxygen, in other words you can put a hundred cents on the dollar back into the consumer experience, and I'm any other retailer and my investors have gotten their lips around the crack pipe of profits and to get very irritable when I take it away, and I get somewhere between 70 and 92 cents, 92% pure oxygen, I can be a better boxer than you. I can be more innovative than you. Eventually, I'm going down. So we have this company that can reinvest not only a gross level, but a net level of capital in the consumer experience that nobody can compete with. So that's the first thing, is literally no company can compete with Amazon. And then the second thing is our entire society, our roads, our hospitals, our military, is based on profitability. And that is we

tax profits, corporate profits, I think about 22-23% of our tax base. What happens when the most successful company in the world has paid in the last 10 years $1.4 billion in taxes and Walmart has paid $64 billion despite the fact that Amazon added the value of Walmart in a three-month period in 2017? So there's this new dynamic we're not used to. And I don't know if you noticed in the most recent earnings call, Amazon took its profits down again. About a quarter ago, they said, oh, here they are, Amazon's making profits. I literally think, and I don't know this, but I'm fairly certain this, every time Amazon, the CFO, and Jeff Bezos get together as a team, and they say pre-earnings,

our profits are up. He looks around and he goes, you fucked up. Green light, everything. Green light, everything. Because as long as the market continues to take your stock up, why would you ever give up the ability to put 100 cents back into the company? So if you notice in our last earnings call, they've taken profitability back down again. So no company compete with that. We've never seen a company reinvesting that sheer amount of capital with zero profitability and as a result, zero tax base. And it's also led to this, I apologize, I'm going on, this third really weird dynamic

is now all company, every company mimics the leader. And so now every company is trying to make the jump to light speed and establish themselves as the leader, get access to the cheapest capital and reinvest massive amounts of money. Netflix is probably the best example of company that's been able to do that. But what it's led to is some other companies that believe as long as we tell this great consumer story, the markets might buy into it and we can invest not 98 or 100 cents back on the dollar, but we can invest 200 cents on the dollar back in the business. We work. We can invest 150 cents back on the dollar, Uber, but the market is showing it's probably not got the same

sort of patience for that type of company that has negative gross margins. So Amazon always had positive gross margins. Anyways, the ability to constantly reinvest and get this far, we've never seen it before and it has totally changed our economy as it relates to the investment markets, the capital markets, and the consumer experience. A couple of things there. Yep. I think I counted six, but I'm going to get to two or three. One is, you know, you mentioned basically literally no one can compete with Amazon. Yep. So we have a room full of, I don't know what percentage, but a large percentage of brands and retailers.

What happens to our poor attendees in five years if no one can compete with Amazon? There'll be some very well-publicized stories about breakthroughs away. They're incredible. By the way, they should probably test on Amazon. They're brand purists right now. The only way they're going to grow into that billion-dollar market valuation they just raised money at, which is wildly overvalued, is if they dramatically increase their top line

and they do some limited distribution through places like Nordstrom's and Macy's, and I would even test a little bit on Amazon. There'll be some limited examples of winners. Warby Parker's a winner. There'll be, people love, the media loves writing about these little winners. However, it masks a much more disturbing trend. And that is if you look at seed funding across all the different sectors in our economy, it's dramatically down across about half of all sectors. And if you look at those sectors, they all have one thing in common. They're competing with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google and can't get funding. So I challenge you to start an e-commerce company right now and get funding.

What Away and YRB Parker did was incredible because it is very hard to get funding for an e-commerce company. There were twice as many new businesses being started every day in the Carter administration than are being started today. We've bought into this bullshit notion that we live in an era of innovation. We live in an era of non-innovation,

where everybody's trying to be the one Amazon. They'll get a ton of press coverage. Maybe you know someone who works at Amazon. Maybe you know someone who works at Away. We'll put Away on stage. So we're under the impression there's a ton of acorns blooming. No, there aren't. This is the era of non-innovation because the fastest growing parts of our economy are controlled by one or two players, and no one wants to invest

in anything remotely near them. So some of you will break through. People in this room are in the 1%. If you can survive in New York and afford that apartment in Brooklyn, you're likely in the top 1% of innovators. And it most likely means your parents are putting you through New York. I live in New Jersey. New Jersey. Yeah. But it has a terrible chilling effect on the economy.

And it's cauterizing all kinds of innovation. And we don't know what we're missing because, again, 20 years ago, 15% of all companies were less than a year old. Now it's 7%. Yeah, I want to get to that, we don't know what we're missing. So, you know, one of the big topics around antitrust has been sort of the framework in which this country has viewed competition and, you know, the need for government to step in over the last couple of decades. And to put it very simplistically, if the consumer is benefiting from a company, it's probably a good thing, and we should continue to let that happen. Then there's Amazon.

Is there a consumer welfare argument for why? I know some of these sellers have reasons why they think Amazon keeps prices high. What, in your opinion, is that argument around Amazon and if there is sort of a downside to consumers? So typical antitrust, right now antitrust for the last 30 or 40 years is based off of basically Bork University of Chicago that says it's about consumer harm. That's the test. If it's good for consumers, we as antitrust of the DOJ leave it alone. And by the way, the number of FTC and DOJ investigations opened every year has declined by like 80 or 90 percent. Basically, the DOJ and the FTC are no longer countervailing forces to private power. They're co-conspirators, right? So you have

basically antitrust is asleep at the switch because of this consumer test. Before that, it used to be this Brandeisian test where they looked at what was happening to competition more holistically. And I think we're going to go back there. But even if we don't go back there, let's talk about the consumer test. I would argue that the price of Facebook being incurred by all of us, despite the fact it's free, has skyrocketed. The fact that in my view we have an illegitimate president who is slowly but surely eroding the rights of a woman's choice, I think that price is pretty fucking high for all of us. The fact that I am more worried about my 12-year-old son, now that he has a phone, being admitted to an emergency room for self-cutting, which is up 80% among girls and up 40% among boys because of the social media

addiction, that's a pretty high price to pay for parents. So I would argue, even on a consumer test, yeah, great, I get my Nespresso pods in 48 hours for 3% less than I used to. The price each of us is paying for this tyranny of technology, which continues to march on, is skyrocketing. So Amazon's not Facebook. I understand that for Facebook. Well, look at it. Okay. So the price we pay for Amazon. Look what's happening in terms of startups. I think that's a pretty high price to pay. We don't know what we're missing. A third of all, I mean, if you're looking, basically what's happening in retail, retail is going through a fairly significant apocalypse. More store closures in 2019

year to date than 2018, which was our worst year in 30 years. Think of a great retailer that's starting up. There really aren't that. Retail is really struggling right now. By the way, retail is the third largest employer in America. There are three million cashiers in the US. You could used to be able to string a decent life together of two. If one person was an assistant manager at Old Navy and the other was union at Kroger's. They could string together a decent middle class lifestyle.

That's not happening. Now, should a company be able to take AWS, which in my view in two years will be spun and will be the most valuable company in the world, massively profitable, should they be able to funnel those profits into the retail group, which we largely think of as Amazon and sets the tone for all of Amazon, and sell? I think if you did real accounting around what it costs to get you, my kids at my work now order lunch off of Amazon now and get it within 47 minutes. If you looked at the cost of doing that, I think they're selling stuff either at cost or slightly below. It's being subsidized by Amazon Media Group and AWS, which are hugely profitable. When the Chinese tried to do that with steel, they said, we're

going to roll up the international steel market and we're going to sell steel into the U.S. market for less than cost. Back then, we called it dumping. With Amazon, we call it innovation. So we have some very difficult questions to ask. Should we allow a company to be able to funnel profits from here to another group and thereby, quite frankly, decimate an industry which has been a great taxpayer and a great employer? Some retailers had it coming. Going to a Sears, all right, they deserved it, right? They deserved it. There's a lot of mediocre retail or bad.

There's a lot of bad retail. But try and start an e-commerce company right now. Anyways, I think the cost to consumers is we don't know what we're missing. I don't think there's been a ton of innovation in retail. When we think of innovation in retail, people have a pretty short list. There's little Q companies that get bought, hope that they sell. But there's really... Name a retailer. Fast Fashion was pretty innovative, but now they're getting their turn at the woodshed.

Fast Fashion is really declining fast. If you look at the market cap of H&M and Inditex, they're falling off a cliff right now. So Amazon is... Let me show you... Here are the charts. This is the chart, the stock returns for one company in retail, and here's the stock chart for all of retail. If you gave those two data sets to a statistician, they would say every day that Amazon stock goes up, it's at the price of all of retail. And some people might say, well, okay, they had it coming. I would argue that it's noncompetitive, and we have a much less diverse ecosystem than we should. We'll be back with more conversation about Amazon with Land of the Giants host, Jason Del Rey,

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Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca We're back. Let's get back to our conversation with Jason Del Rey on Amazon at the Code Commerce Conference in New York. You mentioned AWS. You think AWS is something that is forced to be spun off, or you think Amazon, I've heard you say, I think maybe once or twice before, that you think Amazon would go ahead and do it on their own, spin it off? So I love predictions.

I think the most valuable company in the world in the next year will be Amazon, and I think the most valuable company in the world in three years is gonna be a company called AWS. I think Jeff Bezos is smarter than the rest of us, and as he sees the DOJ and FTC start to go after Google, go after Facebook, and they'll be successful with both of those, and then they start to think about, okay, who's next, Apple or Amazon?

I think Jeff Bezos will prophylactically spin AWS, and within 12 to 24 months of the spin, AWS will be the most valuable company in the world. If you look at the multiples on cloud-like companies and take those same multiples and attach them to AWS's growth and profitability, AWS, again, I believe in two to three years will be the most valuable company in the world. And I think he will spin it prophylactically because he would rather have it be by his own hand than have someone come in and tell him he's got to split it up. But an ego thing or just business sense? Well, you say that if it's a surprise.

I mean, this is... By the way, he lives here now. I'm shocked he's not speaking. You talked about price. Let's talk about consumer price. Let's talk about the price of the Commonwealth at the hands of Amazon. In the 1980s, Reagan had this whistle call called Welfare Queens, right? Which was basically a...

It was disguised racism and he had this image of an African-American woman sipping champagne... Wasn't disguised. Wasn't disguised. There you go. Poor... Right? The mother of all welfare queens is Jeff Bezos. If he owns...

I think he owns 17% of Amazon. If you look at all the subsidies that Amazon has gotten by playing municipalities off of each other and saying, well, we'll put our data center there, we'll put our warehouse there, we'll put our HQ234A and B there, right? over the other are taking advantage of short-term politics where every municipal official wants to be the individual that detonates a prosperity bomb in town square, they've gotten billions of dollars in taxpayer funding. Times that by 0.17, and that's what Bezos has gotten directly from the government. He never pays taxes because he never sells stock, triggering a taxable event. He just borrows against his stock at probably 2% from J.P. Morgan. So every year, my thesis is that we are paying the wealthiest man in the world out of our tax treasury. So we have never had a welfare queen, if you will, the size of Jeff

Bezos. And again, it's because our tax structure and our idolatry of innovators means that every other company, every other taxpayer pays more and the most successful company and the wealthiest man in the world don't pay anything. So, Alexa, is this a good thing? Can't believe I'm gonna play devil's advocate defending Amazon, but here we go. Second largest employer in the US, right? Amazon? Amazon, private employer. If you include their warehouse workers. Correct. Right, okay. Okay. Good thing, bad thing. Here's the issue. We have a tendency, I love the term tyranny is the deliberate removal of all nuance. If we had to pick two doors, between one of two doors, Amazon or no Amazon, I think we would pick Amazon. By the way, I love Amazon. I own their stock. Took you 25 minutes to get there, but... I do. As a consumer, I own their stock.

I'm a Prime member. I think Marvelous Mrs. Mizell is amazing. I teach 160, 180 kids. 15 to 25 will get jobs at Amazon. They're the number one recruiter out of my class. Second is Google. Third is Goldman. What's not to love?

They used to love me. They used to love me. But here's the issue. They're a net good for society. But here's the problem. The word net. Pesticides are a net good for society, but we still have an EPA and an FDA. Fossil fuels, in my view, are still a net good for the world. But we have emission standards, and we're moving to electric. We look at Amazon, and the argument is, well, on the whole, aren't they good? I think there's some amazing things about Amazon. They're a great employer. I think it's actually probably a good place to work.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 I thought was a leadership move. They treat their employees at headquarters really well. It's an amazing service. It is good for consumers. There are some retailers that stuck out their employees at headquarters really well. It's an amazing service. It is good for consumers. There are some retailers that stuck out their chin and had it coming. But does that mean we just say, okay, let's not do anything? Let's not look at the taxation system. Let's not look at anti-competitive behavior. Let's not look at maybe the economy as a whole would be oxygenated if we broke them up. So I think Amazon is amazing. I think they could be amazing squared

if the people in DC decided to put some nuance back into the examination of these companies. I'm not saying they're bad people and we should break them up as a punishment. I'm sure the folks at AT&T, the aluminum companies, and the Seven Sisters of the Oil companies were probably lovely people. But a key component of a healthy economy is once one company becomes an invasive species,

we move in and we break it up and we oxygenate the economy. And it's time. I don't think they're bad people. There's some great, great things about it. But let's keep this disco party going. If you want the market to keep going up, the best thing we could do for the market right now would be to break these guys up. Because on a sum of the parts basis, I think they're worth more than they are as a whole. So break AWS apart and it in investor speak would say unlock value. 100%. What does that happen? Well, okay. So if you look at Instagram and you put a multiple on Instagram of a similar company, a Snap, Instagram is worth 60 to 80 percent of the market cap of Facebook right now. So as long as you think Facebook with WhatsApp and the core platform are still worth 100

or 150 billion dollars, you have shareholders that do really well. I think AWS is worth somewhere between three and eight hundred billion dollars right now, meaning it might be worth as much as the entire company. And if you were to take AWS out of Amazon and still have the retail platform, still have the fulfillment, still have Amazon Media Group, you still have a company worth a lot of money. When you look at spins and breakups, AT&T, if you look at the value of AT&T pre-breakup and then 10 years post, it was worth a lot more. This will unlock eBay, the spin of eBay. These companies will be worth a lot more. So I always say we don't break them up because we're angry. We don't break them up because they're bad people. We don't break them up because they avoid taxes. We all try to avoid taxes. We

don't break them up because they're selfish people. We don't break them up because they avoid taxes. We all try to avoid taxes. We don't break them up because they're selfish. Everyone here has an obligation to affix your own mask first and provide economic security for your own family. I don't think they're bad people. We break them up because we're capitalists. A key component of capitalism is ensuring that no individual or no individual company has too much power.

It's a key part of what is the greatest economic engine in history. And for some reason, we seem to have lost the script, in part because these companies, A, have more ammunition. Amazon has 88 full-time lobbyists in D.C. 88 full-time, highly paid, highly educated people playing golf, going to dinner, making donations to people, and educating them about how wonderful Amazon as a combined company is for the economy. And we have a group of individuals, elected

officials, somewhere between four and seven percent of have a background in technology or engineering. So we're just, we're just, we're outgunned. But anyways, I love Amazon. Let's make it even better. Let's break it up. Scott, thank you. Thank you, Jason. I'm so glad you and Jason could put your podcast feud aside. No doubt we'll be talking about whether or not Amazon will actually ever get broken up on future episodes of Pivot. Definitely. And if you haven't checked it out yet, go listen to Land of the Giants. Thanks again to Jason Del Rey. We'll be back later this week with more Pivot to break down all things tech and business. This bonus episode of Pivot was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Megan Cunane edited the episode. Art Chung is our head of production. And Golda Arthur is Land of the

Giants' senior producer. Thanks also to Pivot's executive producer, Erica Anderson. And thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. It's not always easy to harness the power and potential of AI. For all the talk around its revolutionary potential, a lot of AI systems feel like they're designed for specific tasks,

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