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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.
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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?
I would say that, as it relates to me, they didn’t provide access, but that doesn't mean I didn’t get access. I spoke to 17 S-team members—the most senior people at the company—for this book, without the company knowing. I spoke to hundreds of people in and around the company. I had hundreds of pages of internal documents. They didn’t really cooperate for the book in setting up interviews, and I understand why. Some of my investigations at the Journal had been very hard-hitting. One of them was the basis for Jeff Bezos’s being called to testify to Congress for the first time in his career. So they didn't participate on an official basis, but I of course did a full fact-check. Out of fairness, I incorporate their PR statements and rebuttals very generously throughout. But it is an interesting company from a PR standpoint. There was an investigation from Mother Jones about the company bullying reporters, how they have lied to reporters in the past, and how that makes things difficult for reporters trying to cover the company. And that investigation questions whether that’s a tactic to get people to back off and not even want to cover them in the first place.
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What do you think it is about Amazon’s internal culture that made so many employees willing to talk to you?
Amazon is the most interesting company culture and the most aggressive one I’ve ever covered. It’s a giant company. More than a million people work there. The turnover and the burnout is much higher than at most other companies. People tend not to last, because it’s very aggressive and it can be bruising. As a result of that, a lot of people have come to me—both people still there and people that have left—to tell me their experiences.
When I delve into what goes on behind the scenes and the anticompetitive business behaviors that make Amazon win so often, a lot of it is the product of this culture. A lot of the shocking behaviors are because of this company’s culture. If you’re auditioning for your job every day, and you’re auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no matter what, and at the same time, you have access to unrivaled data on partners, sellers, and competitors, you might be tempted to look at that data to get an edge and keep your job and get to your restricted stock units. If you’re at [Amazon] and you’re meeting with [outside companies] on the dealmaking side or the Alexa venture capital side, you might be tempted to not forget what you learned in those meetings and use it on a product to have a home run.
