Inside the Brutal Business Practices of Amazon—And How It Became “Too Toxic to Touch”

In May of 2020, seven members of the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee penned a letter to then CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos. “On April 23,” their message began, The Wall Street Journal “reported that Amazon employees used sensitive business information from third-party sellers on its platform to develop competing products.” The article contradicted previous sworn testimony from the company’s general counsel, possibly rendering the testimony “false or perjurious,” the seven congressional leaders wrote.

The Journal’s exposé, which ultimately spurred Bezos’s first-ever congressional testimony, was written by Dana Mattioli as part of the paper’s wide-ranging investigation into Amazon’s business practices. At the time, Mattioli, a longtime business reporter, had recently moved into the Amazon beat, her interest piqued by the corporation’s tentacular infiltration of nearly every aspect of American economic life. Now, four years later, she’s out with The Everything War, a new book-length examination of Amazon that explores everything from its rise to power to its lobbying efforts and the brewing backlash against it.

In this interview with Vanity Fair, edited for length and clarity, Mattioli and I spoke about the challenges of reporting on an infamously secretive and combative company, Amazon’s forays into political-influence peddling, its new foe in the Biden administration, and which candidate she thinks Amazon execs want to see back in the White House come January 2025.

Vanity Fair: What first got you interested in covering Amazon?

Dana Mattioli: I was The Wall Street Journal’s mergers-and-acquisitions reporter for six years, and in that role, my job was to cover which companies are buying other companies across industries globally. Something fascinating happened during my tenure in that role. It wasn’t just retail companies that were nervous about Amazon. I’d speak to the bankers, the lawyers, the CEOs, the board members at different companies, and they started talking about how they were worried about Amazon invading their industry. Over the course of those six years, those questions got louder. It started bleeding into other sectors where you wouldn’t even really think about Amazon at the time. The company seemed to stretch into every vertical and its tentacles kept spreading. It occurred to me that this was the most interesting company, but also one of the most secretive companies in business history. That to me seemed like such a fun challenge to dig in and see what was going on behind the scenes.

What are the sorts of challenges reporters covering the company face?

I would say that, as it relates to me, they didn’t provide access, but that doesn't mean I didn’t get access. I spoke to 17 S-team members—the most senior people at the company—for this book, without the company knowing. I spoke to hundreds of people in and around the company. I had hundreds of pages of internal documents. They didn’t really cooperate for the book in setting up interviews, and I understand why. Some of my investigations at the Journal had been very hard-hitting. One of them was the basis for Jeff Bezos’s being called to testify to Congress for the first time in his career. So they didn't participate on an official basis, but I of course did a full fact-check. Out of fairness, I incorporate their PR statements and rebuttals very generously throughout. But it is an interesting company from a PR standpoint. There was an investigation from Mother Jones about the company bullying reporters, how they have lied to reporters in the past, and how that makes things difficult for reporters trying to cover the company. And that investigation questions whether that’s a tactic to get people to back off and not even want to cover them in the first place.

What do you think it is about Amazon’s internal culture that made so many employees willing to talk to you?

Amazon is the most interesting company culture and the most aggressive one I’ve ever covered. It’s a giant company. More than a million people work there. The turnover and the burnout is much higher than at most other companies. People tend not to last, because it’s very aggressive and it can be bruising. As a result of that, a lot of people have come to me—both people still there and people that have left—to tell me their experiences.

When I delve into what goes on behind the scenes and the anticompetitive business behaviors that make Amazon win so often, a lot of it is the product of this culture. A lot of the shocking behaviors are because of this company’s culture. If you’re auditioning for your job every day, and you’re auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no matter what, and at the same time, you have access to unrivaled data on partners, sellers, and competitors, you might be tempted to look at that data to get an edge and keep your job and get to your restricted stock units. If you’re at [Amazon] and you’re meeting with [outside companies] on the dealmaking side or the Alexa venture capital side, you might be tempted to not forget what you learned in those meetings and use it on a product to have a home run.

There’s a moment in the book where you describe the company’s business practices as liable to “shift from facilitator or partner to mobster” in “the blink of an eye.” Can you say a bit more about what is Mob-like about the way Amazon conducts business?

They’re one of the most dominant companies across industries. Retail, cloud computing, digital advertising, smart devices—you name it. It’s this giant conglomerate with a staggering number of industries in which it’s the number one, two, or three player. That creates this dynamic where sellers are beholden to them, partners are beholden to them, and even competitors have to work with them. If you are on Amazon in some way, as a seller or even a competitor, you need to use them. Amazon has the leverage to say, “Well, if you don’t want to do things on our terms, then no more access.” We also uncover that Amazon threatened some partners or rivals with predatory pricing. Under the battle cry of being customer-obsessed, they sold customers dangerous goods, like carbon monoxide alarms that don’t detect carbon monoxide, or fake tourniquets. They touted all the good that they do for small businesses in order to rehab their image while crushing many of them.

Let’s talk a bit about Amazon’s PR efforts. The company wasn’t always as invested in burnishing its public image as it is today. When did that start?

Amazon was sort of late to realize how big they were. It’s like 2013, their market cap is over hundreds of billions of dollars, people are starting to cry foul about their behavior, their tactics with book publishers and everything else, but they still think that they’re this scrappy start-up, which is totally not the case. At that point, they’re not really investing in lobbying. They don’t really have a great government relations system set up. The board starts to tell Jeff, “We got to start taking this seriously.” Bezos was really disinterested in DC. In 2015, they brought in someone everyone thought would be a heavy hitter: Jay Carney. He was Barack Obama’s press secretary, and was also very close to then vice president Joe Biden. They bring him on to head up government relations and public relations for the firm. The company really bulks up its forces: thousands of people on government relations and public relations. The team grows really massively, and so does their spending. They start spending like a company of their size. Today, they’re one of the top companies by lobbying spending in the country.

And what sort of narrative do they seize on?

That team focuses on a narrative that they’re doing so much good for small businesses. They start putting out this small-business impact report, where it talks about all the ancillary jobs they’re creating through their sellers and whatnot. But behind the scenes, their business tactics were hurting those very sellers. The very people they were quite literally parading around on Capitol Hill to say, “Look how many jobs we’re creating in your backyard. Mr. Senator,” behind the scenes felt like they were stuck on this hamster wheel, where every year they’re making less and less money on Amazon, where the company could just extort them for fees, and it was becoming less viable.

There’s a pattern that plays out time and time again—more than I could even fit in this book; I had to really be choosy with examples—where entrepreneurs would go to Amazon in good faith. Since Amazon’s one of the top players in so many areas, if you’re selling your company, or if you’re looking for fundraising, you sort of have to talk to them. These entrepreneurs would open the kimono and reveal all of their road maps, financials, give them access to what their patents look like, all under the guise of maybe getting an investment or an acquisition. And then they’d get ghosted, and Amazon would turn around with a very similar product. There are a lot of those contradictions throughout the book as Amazon is trying to create this narrative around small businesses.

One thing that stuck out to me is that even as the company plowed so much more money into PR and lobbying efforts in Washington, its executives kept embarrassing themselves publicly and putting their feet in their mouths. What do you make of that?

I’m glad you picked up on that, because it was really funny to me. The DC team that they hired knew Capitol Hill. They knew how things get done in Washington, DC, where it’s not scorched earth. These were people who came from other parts of government to join Amazon’s lobbying effort, and they were doing something called “watering the flowers,” which refers to making friends on the Hill so that people would be receptive to your talking points. But back in Seattle, where Jeff Bezos was not at all interested in politics and meeting with different legislators, there was a much more pugnacious temperament toward DC and government and any sort of criticism. Their snap reaction to a lot of criticism is to fight back, or “punch back,” as Bezos would tell his team.

So on the one hand, the DC team is walking around the Hill, taking meetings with all these different legislators like Elizabeth Warren. And then Jeff Bezos and his team of top executives are writing nasty tweets at them and undercutting all their efforts to build those relationships. There’s a really fun scene in the book where it’s Jeff and his top deputies—it’s the middle COVID, so they’re not in the same room, but they’re all on a conference call—ginning up nasty tweets to active legislators who could be determining their fate. Stuff like that played out all the time. This aggressive culture, this drive to win at all costs, went beyond their business practices. It pervaded the entire culture of the company, including the way it handled PR and government relations.

The book opens with what one of your sources calls “the most important law review article written in our lifetimes.” What was the article, who wrote it, and why is it so important?

In 2017, a law school student at Yale named Lina Khan wrote a law review article called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” She was an unknown person at this time. The article makes the claim that Amazon is a monopoly, and that the change in the way that antitrust has been enforced in the last few decades means that companies like Amazon are not being regulated nearly the way they should be and that it’s creating monopolies. This law review article does something remarkable. These things are usually not widely read, but it goes viral. Politicians read it. Heads of corporate development and legal counsels at big companies read it. Reporters read it. It really raises her profile, and people start questioning Amazon’s power.

Khan’s law review note was published right as Trump was being inaugurated. Can you talk a bit about how the company responded to Trump?

It’s just so fascinating. They were not at all prepared for a Trump win. They were in shock. This was really bad news for the company, because even before he was nominated, Trump is saying, “I’m going to break this company up. They’re a monopoly. They don’t pay their taxes.” And that animosity just persists and gets louder throughout his four years in the White House. There’s a series of nasty tweets about the company. Behind the scenes, his billionaire friends are in his ear saying, like, “You’ve got to do something about them. They’re ruining the economy.” There’s a scoop in the book where Nelson Peltz of Trian, an investment company, has a white paper written that gets to President Trump’s inner circle about Jeff Bezos and Amazon being this unheard-of monopoly that needs to be stopped. So that’s going on behind the scenes. But there’s also this personal animus that cannot be understated. I spoke to a lot of Trump’s top aides, and they said that this stemmed from him just being jealous of Bezos. He is jealous of people with more wealth than him. This is a constant bête noire for him.

What’s fascinating to me is that this happens not very long after Jay Carney is brought on to head up government relations. He essentially sits out for the four years of the Trump White House. He determined that it was too far afield from his politics to engage with. By the time that Biden is elected president, which Amazon was really excited about, Carney was excited since these were his people in the White House. They think things are going to change. But it gets arguably worse from there. There’s actual teeth to the policies that the Biden administration puts forward.

It’s true—you have some great moments in the book when Carney is texting Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, his old friend, and getting the cold shoulder. Looking ahead to November, from a purely business perspective, who do you think Amazon execs hope wins the election?

It’s really tough to say. I don’t think it’s a great outcome for them either way, to be honest. The Trump years had a lot of rhetoric, but not much teeth. Although I did speak to Trump’s director of the White House National Trade Council, Peter Navarro, and I asked him, “If you guys were so worried about Amazon, why didn’t you do anything?” And he said, “Oh, we would have gone after them in a second term.” Who knows? Whereas for the Biden White House, they placed Amazon’s biggest foe—Lina Khan—at the head of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency regulating them. Biden has backed this antitrust reform movement. He’s aligned with Lina Khan on antitrust and Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ. He said he’s the most pro-union president in American history, and Amazon is notoriously anti-union. And he’s embraced their enemies like Chris Smalls and Walmart’s CEO. There’s a scene in the book where Amazon learns that the Biden presidency just views Jeff Bezos and Amazon as too toxic to touch. They’re getting shunned from the White House, essentially. So I don’t know if that’s great for them, either.

The book ends with some of the legal and legislative efforts to chip away against Amazon’s power, including the recent lawsuit brought against the company by Khan’s FTC. How would you evaluate the strength of the emerging antitrust movement in Washington?

Lina Khan has a lot of momentum behind her. There are even Republicans that are on her side when it comes to antitrust reform. But ultimately you need the courts to side with you, and they’ve had some big losses. So it’s really hard to know where this will end up. When I speak to antitrust experts, they also point out that even if she were to be successful and the FTC breaks up Amazon, is it too late? Do you run into a Standard Oil–type problem, where the Supreme Court breaks up Standard Oil in 1911 into 30-something pieces, and those pieces become market leaders in their own right, and they become the predominant force, and the value of those separate pieces is actually greater than when they were all together? It’s really hard to tell where this nets out.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson provided Vanity Fair with the following response to Mattioli's book: “Amazon’s success is the result of continually innovating for consumers and small businesses over three decades to make their lives better and easier every day. The facts show Amazon has made shopping easier and more convenient for customers, spurred lower prices, enabled millions of successful small businesses, and significantly increased competition in retail.”