His long time best friend is the sci-fi author Neil Stephenson. He originally created Blue Origin as a shell company to pay his BFF a multi million dollar a year salary and get tax benefits doing it, which is why Neil Stephenson was Blue Origin’s only employee for the companies first decade. Bezos used to name internal Amazon projects after things in Stephenson’s books, which is why the codename for Kindle was Project Nell. If you ever read The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer you might remember that the protagonist was a girl named Nell and a device like the Kindle was what educated her to lead a people’s revolution against the corporate monopolies that ran the world.

Jeff Bezos is fkn weird compared to the other current billionaires, all of which are obvious neoliberals/libertarians. I swear he legitimately thinks of himself as a Fordist or something.

One example that has stuck with me is back in the 2000s Jeff Bezos decided to be the billionaire money man bankrolling the push for same sex marriage when other billionaires, even gay ones like Peter Theil, were funding a rightwing culture war against it. I remember an interview back in the 2000s where he explained his motivation came from his personal secretary constantly missing work because unlike a marriage, civil union only covered finances and property. That her partner wasn’t able to handle things like school meetings and doctors appointments that required guardianship of their kids. That the important thing marriage provided over civil union was the ability to have joint guardianship when raising children. That he discovered same sex marriage being illegal was resulting in loss of economic efficiency and social well-being problems in Amazon’s workforce.

I can actually see how from his perspective the moves he made in creating Amazon have been a positive for society in a paternalistic sense. Amazon constantly tries to find social compromises in the way large companies in the first half of the 20th century would. They were the first to start a serious push to electrify their last mile delivery logistics vehicles and are the only carrier that currently has thousands of EV delivery vehicles. After a month of public criticism by members of US Congress over wages, Amazon increased their minimum wage nationwide to $15 an hour at a time when similar companies were fighting tooth and nail on neoliberal principle. I can even see how Amazon leadership might view Amazon Fresh as socially positive because they offer cheaper groceries via Amazon Brands than the major grocery stores in the US and deliver groceries like fresh produce to people in the food deserts that make up most of the US. So many of Amazon’s moves are in response to national discussions about social issues plaguing the US. Ofc, they only seem to have these Fordist principles within the US and it’s always business solutions that protect Amazon from society unraveling.

Amazon is literally copying moves related to healthcare made by Fordist industrialists with its ongoing expansion into becoming a fully integrated HMO. Amazon originally started building out its medical care division to provide healthcare for warehouse employees and then expanded to the general public. Kaiser Permeante, the oldest fully integrated medical insurer, pharmacy, doctors office, and hospital operator (fully integrated HMO) in the US was originally created by Kaiser Shipyards to provide quality low cost healthcare for employees, their families, and local communities. Amazon has been building something that is starting to look a lot like what Kaiser Shipyards did by becoming a massive fully integrated low cost pharmacy, primary care, and health insurance provider. They have so far bought up over 200 medical practices around the US. They created a pharmacy that is cheaper than the other major pharmacies in the US and when someone doesn’t have insurance gives them a pennies on the dollar price.

You probably didn’t mean to, but this comes off as needlessly hostile for me just referring to the most recent thing I’ve seen it in