A good day with Jeff Bezos
steve-yegge.medium.com
steve-yegge.medium.com
People who saw only the footage from a videographer who missed much of it, or which was edited cynically, got an inaccurate impression.
(Shatner was understandably moved by the space flight experience, maybe by something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect )
It was after this bit. Probably when Bezos realized the optics.
> or which was edited cynically, got an inaccurate impression
Ironic to be posting an inaccurate comment, while lamenting inaccuracy...
Here, you can see just how early this happens:
But note that, in CNN video you linked, there's a cut shortly after 1m26s, before the audio and then video of Shatner&Bezos. I can't tell how much of the interaction was missed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTxbq7MTQYY
Bezos listens to an overwhelmed Shatner for close to 10 minutes, hugs, etc.
It may be that he was suddenly thinking of "optics", as someone said, or maybe he wasn't.
Im guessing, once you are in the downswing of life(>40 years) you want to enjoy your money(especially when you have lots of it), because by that definition its also a way of life extension in a biological context where death is inevitable. So you want as many trophy things as possible.
You don't even have to be a billionaire for this. Non trivial millions will pretty much leave you in the same state.
It looks like now there are two white rocks!
I half-seriously wonder if I'm in some private security company's database from that day.
https://www.businessinsider.com/where-billionaires-bill-gate...
The lesser-known little book of quotations by Jon Winokur.
Appropriately enough on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Are-Different-Priceless-Quotatio...
>the elite members of San Francisco's Union Pacific Club needn't worry about handling dirty money, since every coin the enters the institution is scoured by the kitchen staff.
>When the late Time Warner boss Steve Ross flew his wife and two other couples to Mexico one Christmas, the trip required two corporate planes: One for people and one for gifts.
>Christina Onassis used to have Diet Coke flown to her by private jet.
>Asked why she was carried everywhere by a burly attendant, Barbara Hutton replied, "Why should I walk when I can hire someone to do it for me?"
Also, I’ve met lots of audio people who seem to like the design of the system more than actually listening to music.
If this was a dinner party, I’d expect a demo and playing music to show it off. But for a lunch break at a work meeting to basically a stranger, it seems to make sense that he didn’t play anything.
Bezos's colleagues and friends often attribute Amazon's tardiness in digital music to Bezos's lack of interest in music of any kind [...] Colleagues remember that on the solemn road trip from Target's offices in Minneapolis after 9/11, Bezos indiscriminately grabbed stacks of CDs from the bargain rack of a convenience store, as if they were all interchangeable.And if he'd done that, there would be a story about how "Jeff Bezos' stereo costs more than I make in five years, and he made a bunch of employees listen to it in his boat house". Not saying the author of this article would have written it, but somebody would.
But I do know someone who is merely an heir, who doesn't need to live with a bunch of security all the time, because he's not famous.
So probably fame has more to do with it than wealth. Not sure what you do if you're famous but not wealthy, I imagine that could be problematic.
People vandalize his father's grave, break into his home, the police don't come any more. It's cruel and the bullies want him to overreact so that they can also sue him in court.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/s4sqnk/the_st...
Can't he pre-empt this by suing them instead? What's preventing that? I assume his state or the federal legal system has some way of dealing with this...
The problem with this is when you are a very public and controversial online person, and you attract hundreds or thousands of nutcases you disagree with you, you can get harassed plenty without anyone crossing over into territory where there is a cause of action.
This is why many junior/cadet members of foreign royal families like living in the US; they are anonymous here. Princess Victoria, the heir to the Swedish throne, was a student at Yale. Even the Windsors; not Harry and Meghan, of course, but Gabriella Windsor graduated from Brown without much public attention.
Who?
in 2004 he was the founder, majority owner, and CEO of a company with a ~$19bn market cap. he was still firmly in the ranks of the ultra-wealthy.
At some threshold of fame it seems like you just attract crazy people and the risk of them attacking you goes up substantially.
never heard of this. I thought it was his fiance's brother?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos_phone_hacking_incid...
I did not know about the part of the story involving the brother, I must have missed it at that time.
"In March 2019, AMI released a statement responding to de Becker's column that the only source for their story on Bezos was Michael Sanchez, the brother of Bezos's girlfriend, and that there was "no involvement by any other third party whatsoever."[24] A year later, Michael Sanchez sued AMI, stating in court documents that when the National Enquirer first contacted him, they already had "raunchy text messages and nude selfies exchanged" by Bezos and Sanchez's sister. Michael Sanchez denied giving AMI explicit photos, and accused AMI of hacking Bezos's phone."
Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the likes are high profile…but I don’t think anyone will notice if Jeff Yass or Jay Chaudhry walks on the street.
It's not LA or NYC for celebrity saturation, but a lot of rich & famous people come through Cambridge/Boston (and their kids often go to school here), and nobody cares.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/entertainment/entertainment-news/mick...
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-feb-17-la-fi-tn....
but I guess that's what the story was supposed to signal.
my experiences during product demos showed jeff had a great knack for asking the right questions and being able to dive into meaningful details.
perfect ending sentence. sums up the trope of the time-starved billionaire businessmen
I'd especially love to hear stories of winning their respect. Surely somebody wins Bezos' respect -- unless (and it doesn't seem unlikely) his defining property is being too arrogant for that?
How often do technical leaders get rounded up and asked to pitch ideas with little research beforehand?
I did one where a bunch of random ICs were locked in a room for an hour and told to make up ideas to patent.
My group patented an auto parts picker.