.profgalloway: 'The people I work with are ordering their lunch from Amazon Now, which they get in 48 minutes. What if they said, 'In 48 minutes, we can get you a test for either antibodies or the virus?''
Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images Last Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced in the company’s first-quarter earnings report that shareowners “may want to take a seat.” He wasn’t preparing them for sticker shock from the quarter’s losses — around $622 million, chalked up to the cost of rapidly expanding to meet demand — but for the massive investment he planned for the second quarter.
Amazon is going to build and construct through an investment an expertise that no one else can match. They’re going to build the first vaccinated supply chain globally. That is, if you’re a vendor, if you’re a worker, if you’re a customer, anything that goes through their supply chain is not only not interrupted but is virus-free. He’s going to be able to say, “Okay, there’s every other supply chain globally, and then there’s the Amazon supply chain.
But when their stock goes down 7 percent, that’s like losing the value of Boeing. That’s where Amazon is right now; it gains or loses the value of Boeing in a single trading day. So when you’re talking about a company that’s quote-unquote too big, just remember, it can shed or gain Boeing in a trading day. And that’s what happened. He is unafraid to lose the value of Boeing. This is not how most CEOs think. And Wall Street doesn’t care.
Galloway: I don’t know, I think it’ll be more reminiscent of Howard Hughes in front of the Congress. When Howard Hughes went in front of Congress, he was basically very strong. He was one of the most famous interesting businesspeople of the age. I think Bezos would do just fine in front of Congress. I also think he’d have a lot of supporters there. I think a lot of people would basically just tee him up with softballs.
I’m just like, I am blown away by this. I’m totally blown away by Amazon’s crazy vision and march toward $2 trillion. And it’s more important than ever that we break them up. But seriously, what’s so genius about this is that Jeff Bezos has said, “Okay, we have to get into government, we have to get into health care because there are just very few corpses big enough for us to drain enough blood to feed our insatiable appetite, here.” And they’ve effectively said, “Okay, the next-biggest consumer category in the world is going to be testing for COVID-19.”
Galloway: Anand, is there an opportunity here where we might come out of this recognizing that government is important? That delegitimizing and defunding government does have consequences and we might be producing a new generation of younger people who will want a global CDC, who will want cooperation, that we might in fact decide that the world taking a break from emissions does make a difference.
Swisher: If it’s not the political leaders, is it the corporate ones? I want to focus in on the tech billionaires, because you’ve written about them. And they are the richest people in the world. How do you think they come out of this? And you gave Bill Gates the exception.
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