There is a PR war, and it's been waged by Amazon since the mid 1990s when they went public. They had terrible numbers, and so they reframed themselves as a "tech startup" to get in the dot com boom.... and it worked.
There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. In fact, I saw an article the other day comparing the two.
It's nonsense. Bezos, in any other context, would not be a bad person. He's got good management skills, and he has a desire for keeping the quality bar high. But the problem is, he doesn't give a damn about other people.
He's got a very utilitarian viewpoint of other people. Every interaction with them, from his perspective, seems to be about how he can best profit from them. He sees people as resources to be exploited.
I'm a pure capitalist, I don't have a problem with trade, but he's more like a predator.
At least, this is what my interactions with him, and the culture he created at Amazon tell me.
You can sustain such an illusion only for so long, however. In seattle, as far back as at least 1998, everyone know that Amazon was a terrible place to work and an even worse place to do business with (as a supplier, etc.)
I knew that, but I didn't want to believe it, when I took the job.
I do accept responsibility for the stupidity that I displayed in doing that, and in sticking around after I should have left as others have pointed out. I could have avoided this, and should have, by simply holding myself in higher esteem... and never taken that job.