Behind the world's richest man is another super ruthless man.
Text |Xiong Jianhui
If it's a miracle, that's-
Hitting the boss's big bald head is the beginning of a miracle.
[Behind the richest man].
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index list on March 4 shows:Amazon founder Bezos surpassed Musk and became the world's richest man again with a net worth of $200.3 billion.
If you look at this figure as a country's GDP, it can surpass Algeria ($195 billion) in the global GDP ranking in 2023 and rank 54th.
It's really - rich and rivaled.
This is also the long-awaited "revenge" of Bezos, who had a rough run in the previous two years, and its key force comes from Amazon's soaring performance.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023, Amazon achieved net sales of 1699US$6.1 billion, up 14%; ButNet profit reached 1062.4 billion US dollars, a year-on-year surge of 37 times.
For the full fiscal year 2023, Amazon's net profit attributable to common shareholders reached 3042.5 billion US dollars, a surge of 121774%。
This has caused Amazon's once decently falling stock price to continue**, and it has risen by 13 percent in the past February89%, with a total market capitalization of more than 1$8 trillion.
In many people's memory, Amazon, the world's largest "store of everything", is still owned by Bezos. But in fact, he has stepped down from the CEO position in 2021, and now the biggest connection with Amazon is - crazy cashing out on **.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show that in February this year alone, taking advantage of Amazon's super favor, Bezos sold 12 million shares and cashed out more than 20$400 million.
The one who really pushed Bezos to become the richest man in the world and also made great contributions to Amazon's soaring performance was the head of the empire known as the "Shadow of Bezos".Andy Jassy
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Shadow of Bezos
Born in New York in 1968, Jassy graduated from Harvard University in 1990 and received his diploma from Harvard Business School in 1997.
In his first year at Amazon, he "stood out" from a crowd of masters:
In a noisy game of "broomball", as a new employee of Amazon, he held a kayak paddle in his hand and accidentally hit Bezos's big bald head.
This first impression is not good, but it will be unforgettable for the future richest man.
Later, Amazon went crazy to lay off employees to avoid bankruptcy, and Jassy was almost swept away. Bezos, who still remembered this stick, kept him.
After that, Jassy, who intersected more with Bezos, began his opening journey.
In 2002, Jassy was appointed as Bezos's "technical assistant", which is called Bezos's think tank, staff, and partner, but Bezos's fiery temper makes this position synonymous with "boss punching bag".
The "S-Team" reporting directly to Bezos
But Jassy is like a fish in water, and he is doing well. The core is a -
Closely follow Bezos's footsteps and thoughts, and desperately learn from him.
He followed him and attended almost all the meetings that Bezos attended, he observed how Bezos worked, how he asked questions, how he led, drew inferences from them, understood Bezos's thinking logic, and formed his own thinking and logic.
Later, he could even foresee what questions Bezos would ask and how he would solve ...... problems
Eventually, Jassy became a real "strategic thinker" and "Bezos's shadow".
In 2003, Jassy was given a chance to go it alone, and strictly speaking, he created an opportunity for himself.
At that time, Jassy found that Amazon's programmers were "reinventing the wheel" in their own ways when developing programs and sharing data, which was very inefficient, and Amazon's cloud storage could easily solve these problems.
Taking it a step further, he believes that the cloud market will have great potential in the future.
As a result, he proposed at the executive meeting that the company should expand cloud storage and enter cloud computing.
At that time, Amazon's e-commerce business had just made a profit, and it was somewhat "unbusiness" to engage in cloud computing. The two factions then engaged in a fierce debate, with some people pointing out that Jassy "doesn't understand technology", but Jassy retorted that he "knows customers best" - this is very similar to Jack Ma, who doesn't understand technology, when he decided to do cloud.
Bezos listened to the opinions of both sides and immediately made a decision to give Jasy a team of 57ers and let him give it a go.
This may also be the best decision Bezos has made other than to set up Amazon. Because, this fight has created an unstoppable super business-Amazon Web Services (AWS).
How important is AWS to Amazon?
In 2020, AWS revenue reached 453$700 million, accounting for 63% of Amazon's total profit, supporting most of the company's sky.
In 2023, AWS will still occupy 31% of the market share, surpassing Microsoft and Google, ranking first in the world. Sales reached 90.8 billion US dollars, which is the mainstay of Amazon's soaring performance.
Throughout the development of the team of 57 people to the global cloud business giant, Jassy has been the first key person.
Bezos's management style is "ruthless" and his hands are relatively ruthless. For example, if the employee does not complete the task well, he will throw out that heart-piercing cruel sentence after a fierce criticism:
If I hear something like this again, I might as well kill myself! ”
Approachable" Jassy is "not ruthless", but "his hands are particularly ruthless", heDo things vigorously and resolutely, and never drag the mud and water.
Internally, Jassy's work will be known as the "CHOP Club" and will only solve problems, with little nonsense. Once he realizes that what you say is not helpful in solving the problem, he will smile and ask the employee to shut up and never give him a chance to speak again.
This forced the people who worked with him to become a master of hitting the nail on the head, analyzing and solving problems, all of which hit the essence directly, steadily and accurately.
Jassy is also ruthless with his competitors.
In 2013, in order to cope with the competition of competitors, he directly reduced the service of some AWS products by 80%.
This move was resisted and opposed by almost everyone from the heart, but the opposition was ineffective, and he could only listen to him.
It turns out: he was right.
The price reduction not only brought a large number of customers, making customers more crazy to use and rely on AWS, but also compressed the profits of competitors to the limit, dragging down their progress. More and more large companies, such as Netflix, spend billions of dollars on AWS every year to defend AWS.
Moreover, it not only benefits customers, but also cultivates the market.
In 2018, Descartes Labs used AWS cloud resources to build a "supercomputer" for only $5,000, ranking 136th in the global supercomputing list in 2019.
It is also under the continuous strengthening of the application of these customers that the global cloud market has grown rapidly.
also relied on the indisputable performance of AWS, when Bezos decided to withdraw from the front line in 2021, Jassy became the undisputed person of the Amazon Kingdom.
But at that time, Jassy took over more of an embattled man.
[Super Water Reversal].
In July 2022, on the first anniversary of Jassy taking over Amazon, Amazon has been beaten by the super "water reversal" and can't hold its head up.
In one year, Amazon's stock price plummeted 46% from its peak, the largest drop in nearly 20 years, and its market value evaporated by more than $600 billion.
Behind this, there is a series of internal and external troubles that caught off guard.
The ongoing global epidemic, record-breaking inflation in the United States, intermittent ** chains, and slowing consumer spending are all big problems that make Jassy a headache but helpless.
At the same time, antitrust has also made Amazon the target of public criticism.
In July 2021 alone, 12 antitrust investigations came to the door, with the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., and the European Union ......It's all the masters who can't be provoked, and the opening is hundreds of millions, billions of fines.
Dark clouds are on the outside, and there is also wind and noise inside.
Soon after Jassy took over, more than 50 Amazon executives resigned collectively due to dissatisfaction with the "low salary", setting off a personnel storm.
In addition to resignation, there is also the pressure of dismissal.
Bezos' departure coincided with the online boom driven by the epidemic, and he aggressively expanded the number of employees he recruited, but as soon as the wind passed, it became Jassy's excess capacity and overspending costs.
The after-effects of blind expansion are gradually becoming apparent, and the fiery trade union movement is even more unsettling.
Even cloud computing, which Amazon is most proud of, has been "stolen" by friends.
Like Walmart and Target, due to their head-to-head confrontation with Amazon in the retail space, they turned to Microsoft and Google; As soon as Amazon entered healthcare, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline quickly abandoned AWS.
The most fatal blow came from the previous investment in the "Tesla rival" Rivian electric car. In 2022, Amazon will suffer a huge loss of $12.7 billion, dragging down a net loss of $2.7 billion in that year's financial report.
There are thunders everywhere, there are pits everywhere, and even Amazon's internal executives are questioning:
In 2021, it has already taken 2Will Jassy, who has a high salary of $100 million, choose to be conservative and mend the seams and maintain the situation, or will he make a big move and lead the Amazon Jedi to fight back?
[Fanatic Blade].
Jassy's choice, of course, is to make a big move.
If it is said that "the new official takes office with three fires", then his rescue plan can be called"Burn the Amazon".
He's laying off a lot of people like a killer:In 2022, Jassy held high the "butcher's knife" and slaughtered in the bloody storm - more than 100,000 people.
Other companies cut the "main artery", but Jassy directly cut the "brain" - even the hot department of Alexa artificial intelligence has been uprooted.
The large-scale "10,000 beheadings" will continue until 2023; In March of that year, Amazon announced that it would lay off more than 9,000 employees, and basically slaughtered all the employees who were waiting for death in large companies.
In response, Jassy issued an emotional statement: "Due to economic uncertainty, we have chosen to streamline the company's costs and headcount again. ”
At the same time as the personnel was reorganized, the business was also drastically revised.
He vowed to create the ultimate business ecological environment, and hunted down the platform sellers who swiped and defrauded the world, including many Chinese "problematic" sellers, who were all cut and screamed, complaining "Is it stupid for Amazon to make money and not make money"?
The room hasn't been completely cleaned yet, and he's crazy ** to welcome guests:
In 2022, Amazon slammed into an annual "Prime Day" (equivalent to "6.18"), but Jassy was still not happy.
Let's do it again.
So, the "Prime Early Access Sale" (equivalent to "11.11") is here again.
He has reached advertising cooperation with Facabook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., so that users can check out directly on these platforms without jumping, greatly reducing the shopping chain.
One trick down, Amazon's attraction and sales power are greater, he began to wave the "butcher knife" to the platform sellers, greatly increasing the platform commission, although the platform merchants have complaints, but they can only admit it, after all, it is the world's largest e-commerce, is the person who grasps the direction of the tide.
After the whole set of combinations, Amazon's e-commerce business also ushered in a surge in performance in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023. Among them, the net sales of advertising services were 146US$5.4 billion, up 27%, becoming the king of growth rate; **Net store sales were 705At $4.3 billion, it can be called the mainstay of the largest contribution.
But these may not be the key to Jassy's re-pursuit of Amazon on Wall Street, but more importantly, he has built an ark for Amazon to the future while consolidating his base.
On March 5, Anthropic released Claude3, claiming to have achieved a comprehensive surpass of ChatGPT-4.
And the big financier behind Anthropic is Amazon.
In 2023 alone, "Butcher" Jassy will spend $4 billion on Anthropic, silently competing with OpenAI and Microsoft for the future hegemony of generative AI.
In addition, Amazon has also entered the main robot company Figure AI, whose robots are so powerful that they can learn to make coffee only by human demonstration, which can compete with Musk's robots.
This gives Amazon a new space and imagination outside the cloud, and the capital to lead the wave again.
For China, the focus of Jassy's story may also lie in the company's inheritance and inheritance.
Moreover, not only Jassy, Cook led Apple to achieve a $3 trillion legend; Nadella led Microsoft to the peak ...... of the world's largest market capitalization
We always prefer the entrepreneurial stories and spirit of Steve Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Bill Gates as founders, but their **, as well as these people and these things that they have passed down, are equally valuable.
[References].
1] "Bezos surpasses Musk to regain the richest man in the world" Interface News.
2] What is Amazon doing? Net profit increased by more than 37 times in the fourth quarter.
3] "Two Generations of Amazon CEOs: Bezos and His "Shadow"" Zhidong.
4] "The New Head of Doxxing Amazon: A Ruthless Man Who Can Make More Money Than Bezos" E-commerce Home.
5] "The strength of the Anthropic large model surpasses GPT-4 in an all-round way, and Amazon Web Services shows its edge" TechWeb
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