Jeff Bezos, Space Cowboy

Is he trying to look like a jerk? Or doesn't he care? 

I ask these as serious questions. 

Jeff Bezos wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots into space. 

It was a swashbuckling, devil-may-care look. In a country digging its way out of a COVID shutdown that gave a huge tailwind to Amazon, making his fabulous wealth even more fabulous, he chose to go with swagger. 

Jeff Bezos, space cowboy.

His warehouse employees work under close supervision and punishing quotas. Bezos thanked his employees for making him so rich. “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this."

Really???

It didn't seem like he was sharing a sentiment of humble appreciation. It was the grin of the winner at the poker table letting the losers know he is walking away with their chips.

I questioned myself: Are my impressions unfair and just my own?  Did others see what I saw?  I scouted around the internet to look at reactions to him. Others saw the same thing.

He must have wanted to project a certain kind of image--or at least been wantonly unconcerned about how he came across. Yet it seems so counter-intuitive for the CEO of Amazon at this moment, when regulators are looking closely at Amazon and other technology firms. Amazon uses its market domination not as a neutral "common carrier." Some of its business practices are openly abusive to third-party sellers on its platform. Rockefeller did this in the early 20th century. It causes companies to get broken into pieces. Plus, his company was criticized for extracting concessions from cities to get a second headquarters. Amazon was an unapologetic bully. Bezos personally was outed as being one of the billionaires who paid zero taxes.

One would think this might be a time for Amazon to stress its corporate good citizenship.  Yet his rocket took him on a joy ride into sub-orbital space for some three minutes of weightlessness.  It had a fiddling-while-Rome-burns look to it.

What is he thinking?

Possibly this is utterly personal. Bezos is not just a CEO. He is also a man post-divorce, possibly just acting out.  After the Bezos' marriage dissolved, Mackenzie Bezos married a high school science teacher and changed her last name. She has been giving billions of dollars away. She isn't putting her name on things; she isn't showing off. She announced the gifts in a simple blog post on Medium that concludes with this poem by the 13th century poet Rumi:

A candle as it diminishes explains, 

Gathering more and more is not the way,

Burn, and become light and heat and help. Melt.

In her philanthropy and comments she is making a moral and philosophical statement that material things are not the center of life. Mackenzie chose empathy and philanthropy.  

Here is one explanation: Mackenzie Scott chooses to go in one behavioral lane and Jeff Bezos is grabbing the opposite one. She wants to be Mrs. Nice? OK, Jeff will be Mr. Naughty and be proud of it. Maybe Cowboy Jeff wasn't a big "F---you" to the world. Maybe it was toward his ex.

The other thought is the bigger picture one. America is going through another era marked by dramatic income inequality. There was the famous "robber baron" period of the late 19th century age when great fortunes were created through flagrant stock manipulation. The great winners felt triumphant, and they built mansions to show it off. The "roaring twenties" were a second period, when easy credit and flagrant lawbreaking surrounding Prohibition created an environment of high-living show-off wealth, the kind described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

We are in a similar era, now. Credit is easy, the economy is great for people who are already wealthy. Joy-rides into space substitute for mansions in Newport, Palm Beach, and the California coast. It may be a blow-off gesture signaling the crazy exuberant end of a period. Bezos' space ride is the equivalent of Hearst's castle at San Simeon--a mansion over the top but unapologetic, with gold fixtures, objects moved from European cathedrals, exotic animals. Why not? Hearst and Bezos could afford anything.

It is never clear until afterwards that an era reached its moment of maximum exuberance, the moment when an era finally sows the seeds of its own destruction, and the pendulum swings the other way. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the straw on the camel that allows changes to the tax code, new people looking at anti-trust laws, a majority in the Congress that ignores Amazon's lobbyists. 

Or not. Possibly Americans still have an appetite for admiring the extraordinarily wealthy. Possibly their attitude isn't yet one of an economic order out of balance. Possibly Americans look at Bezos and think "why that could be me!"

But I think we are close to the end of an era.