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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+Jeff Bezos isn’t getting less powerful. His power is just getting less obvious. +

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+Jeff Bezos isn’t going anywhere. +

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+Just because he’s no longer going to be the CEO of Amazon doesn’t mean he will fade as a protagonist in American life. That’s because, unlike many leaders in Corporate America, Bezos’s public profile far outstrips his role as leader of Amazon. Even if he isn’t the CEO — or maybe because he isn’t the CEO — Bezos will remain one of America’s most famous business leaders, wielding power in politics, philanthropy, and media. +

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+As prominent today as Apple founder Steve Jobs was before his death, Bezos is not as divisive a figure as one might think. While he has loud critics on the left and right, he is not as widely as disliked as, say, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, polling has found, probably in part because Amazon itself is broadly popular. And he has something else that your standard departing CEO doesn’t have: $200 billion at his disposal to expand his influence and burnish his legacy. +

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+To be sure, that money could prove double-edged: Bezos remains Amazon’s largest individual shareholder, and if Amazon keeps surging and surging, Bezos will keep getting wealthier and wealthier. The tech baron who became the poster child for income inequality — proponents of a wealth tax constructed a guillotine outside his mansion this summer — won’t shake off scrutiny easily. +

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+But the headlines that surround Bezos, 57, over the next few decades of his life will likely center on friendlier terrain. It won’t be Bezos but Andy Jassy, his successor, who gets hauled before Congress to face questions about whether Amazon has too much power. +

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+There is ample precedent for America’s tech CEOs finding their second act in public life once relinquishing the top role at their companies. Eric Schmidt, the longtime No. 1 at Google, became the tip of the spear of Google’s lobbying operation as the company’s executive chair. Bill Gates resigned from his role as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000 to become executive chairman, and then spent the next two decades building out the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; today, during the coronavirus pandemic, he is one of America’s most influential voices on public health. +

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+That other Seattle tech mega-billionaire, Gates, serves as the 21st-century model for the founder-cum-philanthropist. Like Bezos two decades later, Gates had earned a reputation as a cold-blooded corporate killer — but his philanthropy in recent years has helped make him into a widely liked figure. He was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. +

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+Bezos on Tuesday suggested that he would try to follow a similar playbook — although his portfolio is less concentrated and involves more for-profit entities. +

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+“As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions,” he told Amazon employees. “I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.” +

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+Like Gates, Bezos’s philanthropic efforts were in their nascent stages as company CEO. Prior to about 2017 — when Bezos became the world’s richest person for a time — Bezos’s philanthropic footprint was minuscule, which was increasingly earning him negative attention. He’s set up two charitable vehicles since then: At the Day 1 Fund, Bezos has been donating about $100 million a year to charities combating homelessness, and the network of Montessori preschools he set up has barely gotten off the ground. And the $10 billion that he set aside for the Bezos Earth Fund is one of the biggest charitable gifts ever, but it just issued its first grants this winter, and details about its operations are scarce. +

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+Bezos’s civic-minded, for-profit work is more developed. Two decades ago, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an attempt to commercialize space travel. He now sells about $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to finance the private company, which he has called his “most important work.” +

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+“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,” he said in 2018. “Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.” +

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+And then there’s the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013 for just $250 million. The landmark deal is seen as broadly having bolstered Bezos’s reputation; Bezos led a business turnaround at the newspaper, which is now profitable and has added hundreds of journalists. His ownership of the Post has opened him up to attacks from President Trump and even a blackmail attempt connected to his 2019 divorce from his wife, MacKenzie Scott. +

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+“My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me,” Bezos wrote when confronted by Trump allies with a threat to publish nude photos of him. +

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+That extraordinary saga and its fallout helped cement Bezos as one of America’s celebrity CEOs and an occasional gossip figure. His personal life will probably remain more colorful than Zuckerberg’s or Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s, for instance. He will likely still show up on a red carpet or two. Maybe he’ll buy an NFL team. The word “Bezos” will still draw clicks in a tabloid headline. +

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+But the story of Jeff Bezos is about to shift abruptly. The billionaire’s decisions will still have profound implications across this planet and maybe others. But that power will mutate from the corporate to the individual — and from the obvious to the more hidden. +

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+With one big exception. Rhymes with “Zuckerberg.” +

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+Here’s the Great Tech Founder Story we have been told over the years: Brilliant, quirky dude (always a dude) has a flash of inspiration, sets off on a quest to build something earth-changing, gets doubted along the way, and eventually steers his company to massive success — success that comes directly from his leadership. +

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+And here is the Great Tech Company Story we have also been taught over the years: That even though these massively successful companies have grown way beyond their humble roots, they continue to win because they keep the focus and ferocity they had at the beginning. +

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+But just because we all know these stories doesn’t mean they are true. A more honest version goes like this: Once one of these companies attains a certain size and status, it’s very, very hard for the company and its founder to keep that single-mindedness. More importantly: They probably don’t have to. +

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+Which might be the takeaway from Tuesday’s news that Jeff Bezos is stepping down from the CEO job at Amazon, 27 years after starting the company. +

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+Bezos’s move means that of all the major tech companies that dominate our lives today, only one of them — Facebook — is still run by the man who started it. But the rest of them, it turns out, have done fine without their founders. +

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+You can chalk that up to the initial insight, breakthroughs, and drive that got them to the place where the founder could hand the reins to a protege and no one would miss them much. Or you could argue that at some point, these companies are so swollen that they make their own gravity and plot their own path, beyond the control of any single person. Probably a mix of both. +

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+But in any case, it’s clear that most of Big Tech has become so Big and entrenched that it no longer needs the men who made it. +

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+That doesn’t mean they don’t pay lip service to the idea that they’re still the scrappy startups they once were: Bezos, in his step-down note to employees, insisted that it is still “Day 1” at Amazon. That’s a reference to the company’s insistence that everyone at the company — a $1 trillion company that hired more than 250,000 people in 2020 alone — should act as if they’re at a just-launched startup. Amazon also fetishizes the desks that Bezos and his early co-workers made out of wooden doors, which are supposed to symbolize the company’s lean, stay-hungry mentality. +

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+The counter to all of that lip service: There’s a serious antitrust movement afoot that wants to break up, or at least slow down, Google, Apple, and Amazon. (Microsoft, which faced its own antitrust breakup case 20 years ago, has largely avoided the wrath of politicians, regulators, and activists this time around.) +

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+There are still plenty of caveats to consider as we look at what happens when founders separate themselves from their companies. Steve Jobs didn’t leave the Apple CEO job to Tim Cook because he was bored with Apple — he did it because he was too sick to run Apple, and he died months after the handoff. Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, but he stuck around and watched as the company meandered for years under successor Steve Ballmer; it didn’t regain its footing until 2014, when Satya Nadella took over and Gates had truly moved on. Larry Page didn’t formally leave his company until 2019, but he definitely handed over operating control in 2015, and folks inside Google will tell you he had been detached for some time before that. Reed Hastings hasn’t actually stopped being the CEO of Netflix — he’s moved over to become co-CEO with Ted Sarandos. +

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+But investors, at the very least, have learned to live with Big Tech companies run by someone other than their founders. You can see the performance of Google/Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft once their CEOs stopped running the companies day to day; Netflix is the counterexample, but it’s a story still in its very early days — Hastings didn’t make his side-shuffle until the middle of last year, and the overall market has been on a crazy tear for a while now. +

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+The big outlier to this trendlet is Mark Zuckerberg, who has been running Facebook since its founding 17 years ago and who is still only 36 years old. He doesn’t look remotely ready to leave: Not only is there is no obvious succession planning underway, but by all accounts Zuckerberg has been extremely hands-on during the last few years, trying to convince regulators and employees that there’s a way for his company to connect 2 billion people and dominate the market for digital ads without destabilizing the planet. +

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+He could leave, of course. He controls a majority of Facebook’s voting shares, and can do almost anything he wants. And maybe Facebook, like its other Big Tech peers, could chug along for some time without him. Even though the company is constantly battered in the press and by politicians, it continues to hoover up ad dollars without any sign of flagging. Like its Big Tech peers, it’s a perpetual money machine that never seems buffeted by the outside world: Last year, it generated $85.9 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from the year before. +

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+But for right now it’s impossible to see Zuckerberg letting go — not when the US government is suing to break up the empire he’s built, and not when there are genuine questions about whether Facebook and civil society can coexist. Facebook certainly isn’t a scrappy dorm-room startup anymore, but it’s also still tightly tied to the man who created it. Which will be true right up until the time it isn’t. +

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+How the Amazon founder went from nerd selling books to celebrity rocket man. +

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+In a Groundhog Day surprise, Jeff Bezos has announced that he is stepping aside as the CEO of Amazon. He’ll become executive chair of the Amazon board, and Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services, will become the new chief executive later this year. Bezos says this transition will give him more time to own a space company (Blue Origin), own a newspaper (the Washington Post), own a philanthropic fund (Day 1 Fund), and generally just own the fact that he’s one of the richest men on the planet. The Amazon founder says he’s “excited about this transition.” +

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+The timing of the announcement might seem odd at first. It was a few hours after Amazon revealed the design of its HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, and after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered Amazon to pay nearly $62 million over taking tips meant for its delivery drivers. But for Bezos, those must be minor headlines. The day that the 57-year-old entrepreneur lets someone else sit in the CEO seat will be the day that Jeff Bezos completes his transformation from nerdy e-commerce wunderkind to muscled media magnate with rockets to fly and galas to attend. This day has been years in the making. +

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+Bezos has been counting, too. As he points out in his farewell email to employees, it’s been 27 years since he started the company with nothing but an ambitious idea to create a store on the internet that sold everything. (Bezos jokes that the question he got most back then was, “What is the internet?”) After failing to convince his bosses at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw to back the idea, Bezos started Amazon in 1994. For nearly two decades, he was a low-key CEO — a family man who said he read the newspaper, had breakfast with his kids, and got eight hours of sleep a night. +

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+
    <img alt="Jeff Bezos sits on a bench holding a book in front of a library in France." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nKDkPrRxvFdCs31v_KEcEjBfR8I=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22277461/GettyImages_541365582.jpg" />
+  <cite>Yves Forestier/Sygma via Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Jeff Bezos enjoys some books while celebrating the launch of Amazon’s website in France in 2000.</figcaption>
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+Not long after Amazon’s market cap cracked $1 trillion for the first time in 2018, he told an audience at the Economic Club of Washington, DC, that he didn’t just think of himself as the richest man in the world. “I would much rather if they said, like, ‘inventor Jeff Bezos’ or ‘entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ or ‘father Jeff Bezos.’ Those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me.” +

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+By this point, however, the transition from CEO dad to titan of industry was well underway. The process appears to have visibly begun around 2013, when Bezos started shaving his head. That’s also the year he bought the Washington Post for $250 million. It’s important to highlight the fact that this was a personal purchase by Jeff Bezos; Amazon had “no role in the purchase,” according to the announcement. +

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+Things literally took off in 2015, when Blue Origin launched and landed its first reusable rocket. Bezos had actually founded the small aerospace company back in 2000 after seeing the popular Jake Gyllenhaal movie October Sky, and by 2014, he had spent $500 million of his own money on the enterprise. Bezos later revealed that he was selling about $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origins, in a sort of private space race with Elon Musk and his aerospace company SpaceX. But he didn’t call it that. “It’s a mistake to race to a deadline when you’re talking about a flying vehicle, especially one that you’re going to put people on,” Bezos told the New York Times in 2017. “I still think we can do commercial paying passengers in 2018.” The company has yet to send a human to space. +

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    <img alt="Jeff Bezos standing beside a space capsule bearing the words “Blue Origin.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Tgc1BhGMMUVbhll4q4PblGnQyfM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22277490/GettyImages_665033916.jpg" />
+  <cite>Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Jeff Bezos unveils the Blue Origin New Shepard system during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on April 5, 2017.</figcaption>
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+Bezos hit a different sort of milestone in 2018 when he established the Day 1 Fund after becoming the subject of growing scrutiny over how little money he’d publicly given to charity. Along with his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, the budding philanthropist committed $2 billion to “funding existing nonprofits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, nonprofit, tier-one preschools in low-income communities.” Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott announced their divorce the following year. Since then, Scott has begun giving away her wealth publicly — first signing the Giving Pledge and then revealing at the end of 2020 that she had given away $4 billion in four months in 2020. That same year, Bezos committed $10 billion to fight climate change — but again only after escalating public pressure from Amazon employees to do something for the environment. And since Bezos currently has a net worth of over $196 billion, it’s safe to say he has more money to give away. And despite years of criticism, Bezos still has not signed the Giving Pledge. +

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+Of course, one doesn’t become one of the richest men in history without creating some controversy. The FTC fine announced Tuesday represents just one of many labor scandals Amazon has faced in recent years. Some Amazon warehouse workers have long decried the company’s labor practices, saying they deal with dismal safety standards, back-breaking labor with little time off, and the use of contract positions that offer no benefits. Under Bezos, Amazon has also gone to great lengths to prevent its workers from organizing. The company has been cracking down on unionization efforts especially hard during the pandemic, most recently in Bessemer, Alabama, where warehouse workers will vote on whether to unionize later this month. +

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+Bezos seems somewhat aware of this aspect of his legacy at Amazon. In announcing his departure as CEO, he praised the company’s “inventiveness” and bragged that, in its commitment to the Climate Pledge and a $15 minimum wage, Amazon “staked out leadership positions and then asked others to come along.” Similar to his late arrival to the philanthropy scene, Bezos only took the Climate Pledge and raised his company’s minimum wage after tremendous pressure from rank-and-file Amazon employees, politicians like Bernie Sanders, and the public. +

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+
    <img alt="Jeff Bezos wears a vest at the Sun Valley Conference in 2017." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DPg4gi8DLbU3iImqzLGwhL0d1TY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10003221/813884326.jpg.jpg" />
+  <cite>Drew Angerer/Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Jeff Bezos wears a vest at the Sun Valley Conference in 2017.</figcaption>
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+But while Bezos the businessman was launching all these ventures and making all this money in the past decade, he was also going through some personal changes. Again, the process really started around the time Bezos bought the Washington Post. A few months before the purchase was announced, he had been named honorary chair of the Met Gala in 2012, and as Amazon fired up its entertainment division, Amazon Studios, we started to see Bezos on the red carpet in a tuxedo much more often. Then, in 2017, there was the famous series of photos taken at Sun Valley — the one with Jeff and the muscles and the sunglasses. Suddenly, this nerdy tech guy seemed like he was trying to be extremely cool. +

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+Bezos also bought some new houses during this period. He bought a 27,000-square-foot former museum near the Obamas in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, in 2015 for $23 million, and then last year, he bought the former home of the late Hollywood studio mogul Jack Warner in Beverly Hills for a record-setting $165 million. Bezos already owned a lot of houses, including a 300,000-acre ranch in Texas, but these new houses put him yards away from huge celebrities. This is appropriate as Bezos became a regular attendee at Oscar parties and became more of a celebrity himself, increasingly attracting the attention of paparazzi and the tabloids. And who could forget the time he got in a public spat with the National Enquirer over some dick pics? +

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+
    <img alt="Jeff Bezos hangs out with Kim Kardashian West, Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, and Jared Leto at the 2019 Met Gala." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nggcffVdtudigCYmeaFvtUb-hjc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22277486/GettyImages_1147445303.jpg" />
+  <cite>Kevin Mazur/MG19/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue</cite>
+  <figcaption>Jeff Bezos hangs out with Kim Kardashian West, Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, and Jared Leto at the 2019 Met Gala.</figcaption>
+
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+Squinting back through the years, it’s hard to see the dorky guy who started Amazon in the ’90s. It’s almost as though that guy retreated into an office in Seattle sometime around Y2K and emerged a decade later with a chiseled physique, a network of mansions presumably filled with Hollywood stars, and a plan to fly tourists to the moon. And he was still running Amazon! +

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+Now that Jeff Bezos will no longer be Amazon’s CEO, he won’t have to worry as much about the mounting scrutiny over Amazon’s unchecked power or the volley of antitrust cases the company faces in the US and abroad. He also probably won’t have to sweat through any more congressional hearings. That stuff will be Jassy’s job now. +

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+Instead, Bezos will have more time to pursue his October Sky-inspired dreams, to host fundraisers in his former museum of a home, and to work out. And if he really does want to be more involved at the Washington Post on top of all those exciting projects, the paper needs a new editor. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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