CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How Bezos and the Tech Bros Made Greed Godly

Crude photoshop work done by Nathaniel St. Clair. Image Sources: Screenshot from The Big Lebowski. Photograph of Zuckerberg by Xavier Lejeune. Photograph of Bezos by Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz. Photograph of Musk from Office of Speaker Mike Johnson.

If you’d told me fifteen years ago that, as part of covering DC politics, I’d be reading books about space, I’d have told you to take a hike. But when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he set a chain of events in motion.

I remember the day the Washington Post’s sale was announced. It was August 2013 and I was with my friend Tony Norman at our regular falafel haunt on U Street when I got an alert on my phone saying Bezos had just bought the Post for $250 million. “What?” Tony said when I broke the news to him. I read it again, not believing the words either. The Graham family, which had owned the Post for decades, wasn’t known to be looking to sell its prized possession. But now they had.

And in that instant, Bezos was transformed from the billionaire founder of Amazon, into the savior of the Post, if not the entire failing media industry. I read these hot takes with steam coming out of my ears. As the child of parents who owned our local newspaper, I was keenly aware of Amazon’s role in destroying newspapers across the country — namely by bankrupting local business, which are the lifeblood of any local paper (and community). The man who may be responsible for destroying more newspapers than anyone on earth was definitely not a savior of the free press.

That much I knew. But there was a lot about Bezos that I didn’t know. And now that he owned the Post, then the all-important newspaper for local DC politics, it was time to start reading up on the man.

The first book I cracked was The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s revelatory 2013 biography of Bezos. Eight years later, Stone followed that up with Amazon Unbound, another invaluable work. More recently, I devoured Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli’s excellent 2024 book The Everything War. These books laid bare Bezos’ business practices, a good number of which are illegal, or would be if we enforced antitrust laws in this country.

But there’s another aspect to Bezos that these books didn’t quite capture — namely how he’s lost touch with reality.

Bezos truly believes that he’s going to save humanity via an intergalactic bank shot. He’s perfectly open about this, and always has been. As I wrote in a story at Truthdig last year:

Jeff Bezos has long believed that he can save humanity, but only by placing earth’s heavy........

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