Jeff Bezos made his fortune with one truly big idea: What if a retailer did everything possible to make customers happy?
His forcefully nurtured creation, Amazon, sold as many items as possible as cheaply as possible and delivered them as quickly as possible. The result is that $40 out of every $100 spent online in the United States goes to Amazon and Mr. Bezos is worth $150 billion.
Lina Khan made her reputation with a very different idea: What if pleasing the customer was not enough?
Low prices, she argued in a 95-page examination of Amazon in The Yale Law Journal, can mask behavior that stifles competition and undermines society. Published in 2017 while she was still a law student, it is already one of the most consequential academic papers of modern times.
These two very different philosophies, each pushed by an outsider unafraid of taking risks, at last have their much-anticipated confrontation. The Federal Trade Commission, now run by Ms. Khan after her stunning rise from policy wonk to policy player, filed suit against Amazon on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle. The suit accused Amazon of being a monopolist that used unfair and illegal tactics to maintain its power. Amazon said the suit was “wrong on the facts and the law.”
Mr. Bezos, 59, is no longer in charge of Amazon on a day-to-day basis. He surrendered the chief executive reins to Andy Jassy two years ago. But make no mistake: Mr. Bezos is Amazon’s executive chair and owns more of the company than anyone else. It is his innovations, carried out over more than 20 years, that Ms. Khan is challenging. The F.T.C. complaint quotes him repeatedly.
Silicon Valley spent the summer transfixed by the prospect of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg literally fighting each other, despite the odds of this actually happening being near zero. Ms. Khan and Mr. Bezos are, however, the real thing — a courtroom clash that could have implications far beyond Amazon’s 1.5 million employees, 300 million customers and $1.3 trillion valuation.
If Ms. Khan’s arguments hold sway, the competitive landscape for tech companies will look very different going forward. Big antitrust cases tend to have that effect. The government achieved only a muddled victory in its pursuit of Microsoft 25 years ago. Yet that still had enough force to distract and weaken a much-feared software empire, allowing 1,000 start-ups to bloom, including Amazon.
It’s largely because of Ms. Khan, 34, that imposing major changes on the retailer is even thinkable. After spending a few days interviewing her and those around her for a profile in 2018, I thought she understood Mr. Bezos because she was so much like him. Very few people can see possibilities unseen by others and successfully work toward them for years, getting others to join along the way. But these were attributes they both shared.
“How does change happen in history?” asked Stacy Mitchell, an early Khan ally who is co-executive director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research and advocacy group that promotes local power to fight corporations. “Lina has captured imaginations in a way that has enabled the reform movement to engage a wider set of people.”
Ms. Khan and Mr. Bezos were even similar in their silence. For years, every article about Amazon featured the line “Amazon declined to comment,” another form of control. Ms. Khan likewise never willingly surrendered to me a piece of personal data, even if it was inconsequential.
Amazon and the F.T.C. declined to comment for this article.
Mr. Bezos’ unlikely saga long ago entered the realm of myth. He spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s West Texas ranch, wanted to be a theoretical physicist but became a Wall Street analyst instead. He had no retailing background. He was interested in ideas, not things.
Amazon was not the first online store — it wasn’t even the first online bookstore. It spent lots of money foolishly and drove many employees mercilessly. The whole enterprise nearly failed in the dot-com crash in the early 2000s. But the media was fascinated by it, customers liked it, and that gave Mr. Bezos room to run.
A former Amazon engineer once memorably described Mr. Bezos as making “ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.” A company that puts “attendance reminder” signs in bathroom stalls telling warehouse workers they will be “reviewed for termination” if they screw up their time keeping is a company with overwhelming ambition.
Reformers are just like entrepreneurs: They, too, are fighting against reality, trying to carve out space for their vision of how things could be better. Ms. Khan’s journey to confronting Amazon in federal court is in some ways an even less likely tale than Mr. Bezos’. And so, like Mr. Bezos in…
Read More: Lina Khan vs. Jeff Bezos: This Is Big Tech’s Real Cage Match