How Amazon “lied, spied, cheated its way to the top”: WSJ reporter Dana Mattioli
DEMOCRACY NOW
We speak with Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli about her new book, The Everything War, which examines how Amazon came to dominate the U.S. economy through its “scorched-earth” tactics. “I found just a ton of business practices driven by this toxic culture at Amazon, where the company lied, spied, cheated its way to the top,” she says. Mattioli also discusses the threat of antitrust lawsuits to Amazon and other Big Tech firms, political pressure on Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and more.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Teamsters President Sean O’Brien asked both conventions if he could address them. The Republican National Convention said yes. This is what Sean O’Brien had to say.
SEAN O’BRIEN: And here’s another fact: Against gigantic multinational corporations, an individual worker has zero power. It’s only when Americans band together in democratic unions that we win real improvements on wages, benefits and working conditions. Companies like Amazon are bigger than most national economies.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters. Dana Mattioli, you are the author of the new book The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power. Talk about what Sean O’Brien was talking about. And talk about Amazon, when it comes to the Republicans, when it comes to the Democrats, when it comes to its power in the world.
DANA MATTIOLI: I mean, Sean O’Brien is right. Amazon’s sales are bigger than the GDPs of many nations. And my book chronicles its rise from unlikely successful garage startup to the most dominant force in American business history, almost like the equivalent of a modern-day Standard Oil, and the tactics it uses, illegal or unethical or anti-competitive, to put its finger on the scale and dominate industry after industry, and the effects that has on our economy, job creation, or, you know, losing jobs, bankruptcies and innovation.
And, you know, Amazon has had a really bumpy history with both the Republicans, specifically Donald Trump, and also the Democrats. You know, Biden has been really tough on Amazon. He put in place Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency overseeing them. And she brought forward this historic monopoly lawsuit against the company last year. So, they’ve had this scorched-earth approach to government relations and public relations that has made enemies on both sides of the aisle.
AMY GOODMAN: And why did you decide to write an entire book on Amazon?
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Inside the brutal business practices of Amazon—and how it became “too toxic to touch”
by JACK MCCORDICK
In an interview with Vanity Fair, reporter Dana Mattioli reveals how the company systematically stifles criticism, squeezes out competitors, and even pits its own employees against one another. “People tend not to last,” she says, “because it’s very aggressive and it can be bruising.”
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?
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