Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, and the next 30 years of Cadabra

At Amazon’s founding 30 years ago today, its name wasn’t even Amazon. It was Cadabra—short for abracadabra. 

As in magic. 

For the last three decades, when Amazon operates at its best, magic is just what it can feel like for customers. Endless aisles of merchandise available with a click of a button from just about anywhere. Magic. An item showing up at your door mere hours after pressing “Buy Now.” Magic. The ability to grab a juice off the shelf at a corner store and legally walk out without stopping to pay, or maybe you do stop to pay—but with your freaking palm. Magic.

At one time or another, you could say something similar about an experience across Amazon’s other business lines too, whether it be Kindle, Amazon Web Services, or maybe even Prime Video. Someday, that might be the feeling people also get when they use Amazon’s healthcare service or Kuiper satellite broadband offering or an invention that isn’t even in the works yet, like an Amazon commercial airline or something far afield that only the AI gods could predict. 

For the first 27 of Amazon’s 30 years of existence, Jeff Bezos drove this magic machine. With an entrepreneur’s optimistic eyes consistently fixed on the future, there was much less time spent examining the collateral damage left in the company’s wake: The independent merchants that were burned, the startups that were cloned, the workers grinded through until they felt like just another number swallowed whole by sky-high turnover rates.

Really while only on the way out the CEO door in 2021, in his last annual letter to shareholders, did Bezos seem to grapple with at least some of the more complicated chapters of his Amazon legacy that he long seemed to look past.

“I think we need to do a better job for our employees,” he wrote in the letter.

“[I]t’s clear to me,” he added, “that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees—a vision for their success.”

With those words, a new Amazon Leadership Principle was born in 2021: Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer. A second new one, Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility, accompanied it.

A few days after that announcement, Bezos handed the CEO reins to longtime protege Andy Jassy. Bezos’ one-time “shadow,” or chief of staff, Jassy was also the founding CEO of Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division that will generate more than $100 billion in revenue on its own in 2024. 

Surely no one needs to feel bad for him but, three years in, Jassy’s job is perhaps more challenging than Bezos’ ever was. Not only does he need to protect the $2 trillion empire that a Bezos-led Amazon built, but also invent new magic for customers…and investors. 

All the while, he’ll be the one contending with the fallout from all of Amazon’s empire-building that came before. A historic antitrust lawsuit filed by the FTC. A renewed labor uprising thanks in part to the Teamsters. The list is long.

If Amazon is still standing 30 years from today, the Andy Jassy era will play a crucial role in determining whatever it evolves into next. One question is how much customer magic will remain. The other: What did Amazon’s leaders do to limit the negative impacts of their quest for cadabra?

Jason Del Rey

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The rest of today’s Data Sheet was written by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

OpenAI hack. OpenAI suffered a hack last year in which someone gained access to its internal messaging systems and stole technical details about its AI, the New York Times reports. It seems the miscreant did not manage to breach the company’s actual AI systems, nor did it steal customer or partner information, and OpenAI chose not to inform the authorities about the incident.

Samsung profit surge. Buoyed by revived demand for memory chips—thanks, AI—Samsung just blew past analyst expectations with a 15-fold surge in quarterly operating profit, Reuters reports. Sales were up 23% year-on-year and average memory chip prices have risen 15% quarter-on-quarter, accounting for the huge profit rise.

EU vs X. The European Commission will reportedly soon give Elon Musk’s X a final warning about its alleged violations of the Digital Services Act, a new European law that governs online content. According to Bloomberg, X’s failure to tackle dangerous content after the warning could earn it a fine as high as 6% of global annual revenue.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

175 million

—The number of monthly active users on Threads, Meta’s X rival, one year after its launch. TechCrunch has a good piece on where Threads should go now.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Elon Musk’s Tesla recoups all its year-to-date losses after adding a staggering $150bn in market cap in just 3 days: ‘Worst is in the rear view mirror’, by Christiaan Hetzner

China, eager to show it’s open to non-Chinese brands, puts Tesla on a government procurement list for the first time, by Lionel Lim

Microsoft agrees to $14.4 million payout over allegations it penalized workers who took parental and disability leave, by the Associated Press

French billionaire Xavier Niel is building a ChatGPT competitor with a ‘thick French accent’, by Bloomberg

China has requested far more generative AI patents than any other country. The U.S. comes in a distant second, by the Associated Press

Government says Veterans Affairs and State Departments were swept up in Russian-backed Microsoft hack, by Bloomberg

BEFORE YOU GO

Copyrighted music eraser. YouTube has given creators a new AI-powered tool to scrub copyrighted audio from their videos without affecting other audio, TechCrunch reports. At least, that’s the idea: YouTube does still warn that “this edit might not work if the song is hard to remove,” in which case other audio could also be removed.