244. Brad Stone with Karen Weise: The Evolution of Jeff Bezos and Amazon

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Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

Society & Culture


Jeff Bezos’ empire, once housed in a garage, now spans the globe. Between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS, plus Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post, it’s nearly impossible to go a day without encountering its impact. Many argue we live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its founder. But how did this man and his company come to dominate such a large part of modern commerce? Sometimes called Amazon’s biographer, journalist Brad Stone joined us with the deeply reported and vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became arguably one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy, also contained in his book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. In conversation with The New York Times’ Karen Weise, Stone took us from his bestseller which captured the rise of Amazon, The Everything Store, to the Amazon and Bezos of today. He looked at how Amazon has expanded over the last decade especially, with new products like virtual assistant Alexa and with a workforce that has quintupled in size. Stone presented a picture of a man, probing the evolution of Bezos himself, from a geeky technologist to billionaire–and to his transition away from day-to-day activities as CEO to executive chairman. Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which has been translated into over thirty-five languages, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Karen Weise is a technology correspondent for The New York Times based in Seattle, covering Amazon, Microsoft, and the region’s tech scene. Before joining The New York Times in 2018, she worked for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News, as well as the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781982132613  Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.