Original subtitles

This is the original sign that I made for Amazon.com.

Blue spray paint on white posterboard.

The footage of the early Jeff Bezos with the Amazon.com

spray painted on the wall

shows this person who looks completely different

than what the man looks like today.

One of the people I really like, Thomas Edison,

here's a model of his original light bulb.

He is famous for saying 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

HE LAUGHS

Just this nerdy guy in this scrappy company.

But decades later, when you think about the scale and the power

Jeff Bezos has, it's enormous,

and I don't think we've ever seen that in humanity.

His end goal is not the money, but his place in history.

Like, he wakes up in the morning and he thinks,

"You know, I'm king of Earth."

And he has now become a king.

JOURNALISTS SHOUT

The transformation of Jeff Bezos has been extraordinary.

Jeff, in the corner, please. Jeff, in the corner, please.

Bezos has become a caricature of what it's like

to be worth ¤200 billion.

Blast off into space.

A tabloid divorce.

Mr Bezos!

Jeff's ambition was to be number one.

Power reveals who you really are

and he revealed himself as somebody who was extremely ruthless.

Why on earth would they compare your company to a drug dealer?

I completely disagree with that characterisation.

If Jeff Bezos were here right now,

I'd say, "What's the matter with you?"

You're raised to have this American dream.

You go to work, you work hard,

become rich one day,

and then you live this lavish lifestyle.

But then you realise that's just not true.

I have twins. One boy, one girl.

They're nine years old now, but at the time they were small.

I wasn't making that much money,

so having the opportunity at Amazon,

that was more convenient for me and my family.

My name is Chris Smalls.

I worked at Amazon for nearly five years.

I worked hard, got promoted up in less than a year

to assistant manager.

My job required to pick the customer's items

in a timely manner at a rate at about 400 items an hour.

These warehouses hold anywhere between 3 to 6,000 people.

It's very stressful on your body physically

and of course mentally, as well.

I've seen good people get fired for no reason.

I've seen good people quit for no reason.

I've seen a lot of injuries.

I always stood with the workers at entry level.

I think management saw that as a threat.

But I'm not going to allow this company to just crush me

and get away with it.

Amazon is, you know, one of the powerful entities

of modern-day history.

My message to Jeff Bezos is simple -

it's going to be Amazon versus the people.

Today, Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world,

giving Jeff Bezos a fortune of over ¤120 billion.

He's currently the third richest man on earth.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Thank you very much.

You are a captain of industry - Amazon.com,

private spaceflight with Blue Origin,

The Washington Post,

levels of, you know, fame and wealth that are hard to comprehend.

One thing, what would you say is your favourite part

of having me as a little brother?

LAUGHTER

Jeff did an interview with his brother, Mark,

and this was the most in-depth, revealing, personal talk

that I've ever seen Jeff do.

When I am with my brother, I just laugh continuously.

And his brother is not afraid to take the piss out of him.

I've gone through and taken the liberty of pulling together

a bunch of family photos.

Mark wasn't above sharing an embarrassing childhood photo.

This is what I grew up with.

LAUGHTER

They went as lady-killers.

Chicks loved that. They loved that.

We were very successful in high school.

MARK CHUCKLES

In Albuquerque, New Mexico,

my mother was pregnant with me in high school.

And believe me, in 1964, it was not cool to be pregnant,

to be pregnant in high school.

His biological father disappeared when he was the age of three.

His mum remarried, and I would say the rest of his childhood

was somewhat conventional.

My dad's name is Miguel.

He adopted me when I was four.

He was 16 when he came to the US from Cuba by himself.

These hard working, resourceful and loving people made me who I am.

In loving photos across his social media,

Bezos proudly displays his family and idyllic childhood.

Jeff values resourcefulness.

He used to spend his summers on his grandfather's ranch

in South Texas.

He worked at McDonald's.

He actually perfected the art of cracking an egg with one hand.

That's actually very Bezos.

Like, he will study something and he optimises for it.

The gifted student attended Princeton,

graduating with electrical engineering

and computer science degrees.

In the late '80s, he went to Wall Street.

Then he rose to the ranks quite highly.

He worked at a quantitative hedge fund.

Yet Bezos was unlucky in love,

as his brother forced him to admit

in this surprisingly candid interview.

He can't hide from his brother.

Brother knows everything.

I decided I wanted to get married

and I had all my friends setting me up

and I went on dozens of blind dates.

And it turned out I kept meeting people

who were professional blind daters,

and I sort of became a professional blind dater.

That changed when Bezos met his wife,

aspiring novelist MacKenzie Tuttle.

A year after their wedding, Bezos made a big decision.

And he discovered that this thing called the World Wide Web

was growing at an exponential pace,

and very kind of rational,

he started to think about what new businesses could you start?

I mean, this was 1993 when he uprooted his life.

He actually ended up driving across the country with his wife.

The couple headed for Seattle, a hub for technology

and the birthplace of companies like Microsoft.

They set up in this suburban garage.

Who are you? I'm Jeff Bezos.

And what is your claim to fame?

I'm the founder of Amazon.com

and I picked books as the first best product to sell online.

As the internet exploded,

Bezos's online bookshop grew quickly.

This news report was able to capture the geeky founder's business acumen.

The company claims to be the biggest bookshop on earth.

What makes us different is vast selection, convenience -

we deliver right to the desktop -

and also the fact that we're the broadest discounters

in the world.

Four years after launch, Bezos earned his first billion.

But what got this documentary's attention

was his big personality.

You generally hear him before you see him.

JEFF LAUGHS LOUDLY

It's the ear-piercing laugh of billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Now, I've heard a lot about your desk.

It's a door with four-by-fours.

Come on.

This flattering interview portrayed him as a goofy guy

who'd made it big.

What are these things on the floor?

JEFF CHUCKLES Well, these are...

These are, you know, sticky balls.

Remember, this man is a titan of our time.

A giant.

The report breathlessly dubbed Bezos a tech titan at just 35 years old.

The media have always, had perpetuated this image

of Jeff Bezos as this kind of goofy guy selling books.

But it really misses so much of the picture.

Jeff Bezos comes from Wall Street.

He's built this empire to make a whole lot of money.

He had that in mind all along.

Jeff's ambition was to be number one.

There was no being number two.

In 1999, when I first met Jeff,

I was extremely intimidated

because of his intellect.

Come on up.

I'm going to introduce...

This is... This is Robert.

Robert, you're an alum. Yes, I am.

And Robert's been with us for quite a while.

How long have you been...?

About three and a half years. Three and a half years.

We've been to Japan together.

We've been through several trials together.

OK, thank you, Jeff.

Hello, everybody.

This unique footage of a university lecture

was able to capture the closeness of Bezos and his protege,

hinting at their vision for Amazon's future.

So, we wanted to define a product,

and that product is the ability to create your own store

on your own website.

Jeff was an amazing innovator, a visionary.

Straight to the centre here. Thank you.

It was his laugh.

It's what endears him to a lot of people.

But once he's done laughing and you're being analysed,

it can be a scary experience.

Bezos had a reputation of being intimidating,

staring down employees in meetings.

There are points in time where he's just like...

And he just stops.

It could be intimidating

and I think that there is a certain amount of realising

this person's different.

I will always remember from a meeting...

..if you happen to say the wrong thing

like this particular person did,

he would stare them in the eye and say, "This is a tough problem.

"We just need to apply human intelligence to it."

And it's a subtlety to actually say that you weren't intelligent enough

to be the person to actually tackle that problem.

Weeks later, that person might not be in the company any more.

PRODUCER: It sounds quite Darwinian.

It is very Darwinian.

He is a relentless operator and he will sort of do anything

to make his company successful.

So whether he's smart or seems nice when you first meet him,

sure, but like, you know, power reveals who you really are

and he revealed himself as somebody who was extremely ruthless.

"Easy for almost anything to occur.

"Even if we've scraped the sky, we can be rubble.

"Ground zero.

"Is it possible to get lower?"

Not a lot of for-profit presses publish poetry.

When we started the company in 2001,

we were the top-selling poetry book of the year.

My name is Dennis Johnson.

I'm the co-publisher of Melville House Publishing.

We sold books to Amazon the way we would sell books to any account.

They were seen as the cutting edge of retail.

But the precise problem of modern publishing

is that it is a very traditional business

being confronted by radical change.

That radical change was Jeff Bezos.

He shook up publishing by pioneering the electronic book,

whereby millions of titles could be accessed instantly.

Amazon brought a lot of

good things that we almost take for granted right now,

like the idea that any book is available

and not out of print is pretty remarkable.

It's funny to think that the work that we did was so ground-breaking,

and I'm really proud of that.

My name is Jon Reily and I worked in Amazon for three years.

Jeff definitely feels like he's changing the world

and that drive really gets people excited

and they really want to be a part of it.

Let's welcome the biggest kid in the room,

CEO of Amazon, Mr Jeff Bezos.

CHEERING

Welcome, everybody.

It's great to have you here.

We're here today to celebrate kids.

We're here today to celebrate innovation.

And we're here to celebrate the combination

of those two things - toys.

And we're here today to have some fun.

His long-term goal is for Amazon to be THE store

where you buy everything at Amazon.

Gradually, that's becoming more and more our lives.

If we look back, say, ten years, you go to the store,

you get the things that you want.

Now you have the ability to have somebody else

bring it to your house.

I sort of jokingly refer to that as the Amazonification

of expectations.

If it isn't going to show up in my house in two days, I don't want it.

One good question is whether Jeff Bezos has changed the world.

The answer is obviously yes.

From a consumer perspective, Jeff clearly has changed the world

by having changed the way a billion people think about buying stuff.

But critics say that Bezos built his empire

by being a ruthless businessman.

Back in the mid-2000s, he set out to squeeze the book industry.

Bezos came into a meeting with a lot of his book executives

and basically said,

"We need to negotiate with these publishers

"and booksellers much more harshly."

Publisher Dennis Johnson had had a textbook deal with Amazon.

They get a certain discount and then it's their book,

and if they don't sell it, they can return it to us,

and it was just kind of standard deals.

The first time we became aware of the danger that Amazon posed

was when we were called by our distributor,

who said he had had a meeting with Amazon

to discuss the next year's contract

and it was like having dinner with The Godfather.

He said, "They want 4% of sales."

They called it marketing costs, but that's bogus.

I had a very Brooklyn guy kind of reaction,

which was, "Fuck you, bring it on."

And I thought, I'm going to stand up to this.

You don't get to strong-arm me.

And I went to the media.

After we went public, we paid the price.

They removed our books from the website.

As one reporter said to me,

I was the only one foolish enough to go on the record.

Why were people afraid?

Well, it's a thuggish company, isn't it?

In response to allegations of intimidating behaviour

in order to increase fees,

Amazon has previously said that they disagree with this account.

Well, we actually had a kind of a confrontation around the time

of what was then BookExpo America.

And two young men in black suits came up to me

and said, "Are you Johnson?"

And I said, "Who are you guys?"

And I looked at their nametags, and they were both from Amazon,

and they said, "When are you going to get with the programme?"

And I thought they were kidding, you know, so I laughed.

And then I realised they weren't kidding

and I said, "You want to leave now."

And they did.

What's the Gazelle Project?

Jeff Bezos instructed his staff to think of independent publishers

like Melville House as wounded gazelles

and his people were the cheetahs.

It tells you a lot about the company, doesn't it?

They think that we are their victims.

Bezos later said he didn't recall the comment,

but his relationship with the book industry was acrimonious.

I think Jeff Bezos looked at that industry and said,

"I'm a fighter. I can take them."

It was his way or you were... You were out.

Over the coming years,

Amazon would go on to sell thousands of different products.

Bezos dramatically increased the fees it took

from most small businesses.

Today, that's up to ¤34

of every ¤100 that a third party seller makes.

Last year, Amazon took in ¤121 billion in fees.

This is extraordinary.

PHONE RINGS

Excuse me. It's my mother.

Wassup? LAUGHTER

These PopSockets do make me want to dance.

They make me want to dance too, Mum.

# Ah, yeah, we hustle all day All day

# Yeah, we're workin', yeah, we're workin', then we play... #

I'm David Barnett, the CEO and founder of PopSockets.

It's a company that makes mobile accessories.

For most small businesses,

it's taken as a given that you need to sell on Amazon

because of the dominance of their marketplace.

You have to be very careful with Amazon.

They've got all the power.

There were a number of factors in our decision

to leave the relationship.

One did have to do with counterfeits.

It was a painful, painful experience seeing literally thousands

of listings for fake products

and having Amazon do little to stop these listings from popping up.

After maybe a year of this,

Amazon finally agreed to verify the authenticity of products

being listed on our product pages

in exchange for roughly ¤2 million of marketing funds.

It's illegal to sell fake product on the marketplace

in the first place.

But I was at breaking point, so my honest reaction was,

"Great, I will spend ¤2 million to eliminate a far worse problem."

But I'm tired of the strong-arming,

I'm tired of the bullying, veiled or not veiled threats,

so we triggered a clause in our agreement with them.

After Barnett tried to negotiate better terms with Amazon,

he says they retaliated.

They removed all the listings.

Over the course of the next year,

we lost roughly ¤10 million in sales on the Amazon platform.

What happened to PopSockets is absolutely Amazon's playbook.

They go around these companies that are really dependent on them

and say, "Yeah, you're going to have to pay up.

"And if you don't pay up, we're going to cut you off.

"You're going to lose most of your revenue."

The myth of a kind of lone genius

who came along and had an idea and changed everything...

..really misses the very predatory and monopolistic strategy

that has always been part of Amazon.

Amazon's control over commerce

gives it a position to pick the winners

and losers of business.

Usually it picks itself.

January 2019 was this remarkable moment

in the life and the image of Jeff Bezos.

He and his wife at the time, MacKenzie,

sent out a tweet announcing that they have agreed,

after 25 years of marriage, to divorce.

And it was a shock because he had really cultivated an image

as a devoted husband, as a family man.

Then the next day, things got actually even stranger.

The National Enquirer divulged that Bezos actually had been seeing

a woman named Lauren Sanchez.

It was quite salacious.

The pair had been seeing each other for many months.

Here he was, kind of leading an alternate life.

They played every angle and tried to embarrass Bezos.

They had actual text messages,

and that was the real incendiary piece of it.

"I want to breathe you in.

"I want to hold you tight. I love you.

"I'm in love with you."

It's kind of sweet when you think about it.

And frankly, it was, you know, I think unfortunate

and kind of embarrassing.

The affair took a turn when Bezos published National Enquirer emails

alleging they had yet more material on him.

The really explosive threat was that The Enquirer

had what they were calling euphemistically

a below the belt selfie.

And the editor seemed to be threatening that he had it

and that he would publish it.

So the media post that he wrote...

..a remarkable essay...

..is basically saying, "These guys are extorting me."

And he really turned the tables on them.

And it raised the question, how did they get them?

Had Bezos's phone been hacked?

Had Sanchez's phone been hacked?

It was a great mystery.

Jeff raised the possibility that it was an international conspiracy,

that maybe the Trump administration or the government of Saudi Arabia

had provided the information

to The National Enquirer.

Bezos was by now the owner of The Washington Post newspaper,

which was key to his theories.

The Post had been punching Trump in the face

since the moment he took office,

and so there was a lot of enmity there.

So Bezos suggested that somehow The National Enquirer

was doing Trump's bidding,

a punch back at all the critical coverage.

But in the end, Bezos came to a very different conclusion

of who was responsible for leaking the texts.

He accused his girlfriend's brother, Michael Sanchez,

who denied the allegation and sued Bezos, if unsuccessfully.

The National Enquirer was a dumpster fire on every single level.

That was, I think, a great example of the metamorphosis

that he has gone through.

He's going through, you know,

what could charitably be called a midlife crisis.

Bezos has become a caricature

of what it's like to be worth ¤200 billion.

He's accumulated homes in Los Angeles, in Washington, DC.

He's buying cars and he's constructing

one of the most lavish sailing yachts in the world.

Mr Bezos!

He's living the life, man.

He's the rock star.

Lauren Sanchez's aspirational social media posts

depict Bezos's new life.

He's not that nerdy little guy sitting in a cubicle any more.

He's looking like he's on The Mod Squad or something.

Why are you wearing sunglasses? It's night.

My dad always used to say there are only two people in the world

that wear sunglasses at night

and that's jackasses and blind people.

Well, you're not blind.

My friendship with Jeff is based on mutual respect.

I've never had an opinion about wealthy individuals

that want to do extreme things.

Truthfully, many of them are friends of mine.

My name is David Concannon.

I am an explorer.

I led the Apollo F-1 project for Jeff Bezos.

The journey to find the engines that launched men to the moon.

It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

This was to find something that had fallen from space.

They didn't know where they were.

This was his dream.

This was his plan that was set in motion.

Bezos wanted to secure this passion project a place in history.

He even commissioned this ambitious documentary about the mission,

styling himself as an explorer.

It's hard to find something more profound as an engineer

to object than the F-1 engine.

Apollo 11, I was five years old

and it really was a seminal moment for me.

I remember watching it on our living room TV.

I had the excitement of my parents and my grandparents.

Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement.

They know that something extraordinary is happening.

The National Geographic-style film showed the huge scale

of the operation and the shared passion the two men

had for the mission.

When you explore, you're doing things that nobody has done before

and things can always go wrong

when you're doing something for the first time.

If you look at the film that we did,

he's somebody who is intensely curious,

intensely passionate, hardworking.

We haven't always agreed or seen eye to eye on certain things,

but he gives you the space to succeed.

The word impossible either doesn't exist in his lexicon

or is spoken very infrequently.

If Jeff were to say this is impossible,

he would qualify it and say, "This is impossible for now."

This wasn't the only space-themed passion project that Bezos

had ploughed his billions into.

A lot of people who go to space want to tell us more about the universe.

Jeff Bezos is very unassuming.

To me, he's like a friend, a brother.

I'm Lori Garver, and I was the second in command of Nasa.

Garver championed private space travel,

such as by Bezos's company Blue Origin

and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

We have the billionaires willing to put their own money

into some of these vehicles.

Jeff Bezos has told me he did it because just growing up,

his favourite thing was space and rockets.

T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven...

To great fanfare, in 2021,

Bezos got to test his very own rocket.

Blue Origin's excitable footage painted him

as a real-life astronaut.

..has cleared the tower,

on our way to space with our first human crew.

Go, Jeff, go!

Of course I watched.

It was very exciting to see.

Ah! Ah!

He was like a little kid, just enjoying himself.

Oh, fantastic! Is it everything you thought it would be?

Yeah, well done!

But he knows it's not universally loved by everyone.

Space billionaires have become the butt of jokes.

Some watching over-the-top Blue Origin promos like this

had one observation about the shape of Jeff's rocket.

Good. LGS check, good.

The design of that was interesting.

I mean, it looked like a penis. Everybody knew that.

Why would you do that, right?

CHEERING

And a lot of people have made some very funny spoofs.

The funniest I saw was a guy from Seinfeld plays Bezos.

Do you know in 1961 we sent the chimpanzee into space?

But not in a dick that looks like my dick.

Not enough. Not short enough!

Not wide enough!

Not enough!

A lot of people view the Blue Origin launch as a little bit of a joyride.

It's an immense personal expenditure for not a lot of public benefit.

The spoof left no doubt as to who benefited most

from the billionaire space race.

One small step for mankind,

one giant leap for me personally.

People are struggling with, you know,

what's the value of just going to space for ten minutes or so?

CHEERING These are controversial people.

Footage of Blue Origin's post-flight press conference

proved most controversial.

I want to thank every Amazon employee

and every Amazon customer,

because you guys paid for all of this.

And every Amazon employee,

thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I didn't watch him go to space.

I heard what he said.

He thanked the workers for paying for all of this.

And, you know, that right there was

another slap in the face to the workforce.

This man used to buy half a billion dollar yachts off of our backs...

..and then pretty much disrespect us by thanking us for paying for this.

Jeff Bezos was making ¤13 billion a day in the height of the pandemic.

It was a lockdown outside,

but we also didn't sign up to work in the pandemic, as well.

Chris Smalls had been in dispute with Amazon

when he was repeatedly passed over for promotion.

But relations worsened when Smalls accused them of failing to provide

adequate PPE in the warehouses.

Workers were sick, vomiting, dizziness, fatigue.

As a supervisor, when I raised concerns,

it kind of fell on deaf ears.

I was labelled insubordinate, labelled as a troublemaker.

I had to take further action leading a walkout.

They said I violated social distancing policy.

That's when the company terminated me.

After Smalls was fired, he gathered Amazon workers

to protest their working conditions.

We all protested in front of every Jeff Bezos penthouse or mansion

that we could find.

We went down to DC and we went out west to Beverly Hills.

This is where I held one of the first protests ever

in New York City, right here at this very spot.

Currently, we're in front of Jeff Bezos' many penthouses

and mansions.

Once I went public with everything, Amazon saw me as a threat.

It kind of put a target on my back.

After Smalls blew the whistle on warehouse conditions,

Jeff Bezos fought back.

In Seattle, a meeting was called among the members

of the senior leadership team, which Bezos presides over.

There was a discussion about Smalls.

Leaked to the media was a meeting memo

describing Smalls as unintelligent.

"He's not smart or articulate,

"and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him,

"we should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out

"the case of why the organiser's conduct was arguably illegal.

"Make him the most interesting part of the story."

Obviously the things that they said in that meeting were disgusting

and definitely a stigma in the black community,

calling me not smart or articulate.

Jeff Bezos was present in this meeting

and signed off on pretty much what they call a smear campaign,

which explains a lot about his character.

We're talking about the richest man in the world at the time

crushed somebody who already lost their job.

There was an outcry when the transcript was leaked.

Smalls happens to be black,

and the comments were seen as kind of racially tinged.

Right here. Right at that spot. CHEERING

Amazon have previously denied they knew Chris Smalls was black

and that the comments were in response to Smalls

endangering Amazon workers after exposure to Covid-19.

It had the effect of really increasing Smalls's public profile.

I'd say, "Jeff, when you're out on your yacht,

"I want you to think about the workers."

This was an attempt to discredit and malign Chris Smalls.

It's of a standard Amazon playbook,

and this is how they deal

with workers who speak up against them.

It's how they deal with small businesses that try

to speak against them.

It's how they deal with suppliers that try to stand up to them.

It's when you have the power to bully other people

and get away with it.

Amazon doesn't have a union here in America.

Amazon spends millions of dollars trying to stop

these union campaigns.

I watched this company hire and fire people every day.

I could have done two things.

I could've just faded away or I could really try to create

something that's going to change the culture of Amazon.

Smalls planned to form the first ever worker union at the company.

Workers were to vote on the plan in March 2022.

Don't give in! CROWD CHANT

Workers are currently voting up until tonight.

We're hoping that this will spread like wildfire.

When you talk about billionaires,

in order to become something like that,

you had to exploit a class of people

and that's what Jeff Bezos has done.

And now you're seeing the tides change.

CROWD CHANTS: ALU!

April 1st, 2022,

was a momentous day for former Amazon worker Chris Smalls.

To the first union in American history.

CHEERING

We went for the jugular and we went for the top dog,

because things have changed.

We're going to unionise.

Today's monumental. It's historical.

One of the most historical campaigns in the country.

This is a catalyst for hopefully a revolution.

Jeff Bezos should be quite afraid of what is going to happen

when the people come together.

This is just the beginning for us.

Smalls has been up against one of the world's most powerful men.

Jeff Bezos, the biggest man on the planet.

That's a funny thing to consider.

Where you go from being this, you know,

nerdy computer guy to being the king of the castle, as it were.

It appears that his humility has somewhat dropped in terms of,

"I can do whatever I want."

The majority of the time people think of Amazon,

they think of the retail business.

They don't necessarily consider the other business units of Amazon

which support that.

Amazon became one of the largest trucker brokers in the country.

Amazon is one of the largest airlines in the world.

But Bezos created one behemoth that dwarfs all others.

Amazon Web Services, AWS,

controls about 40% of the world's cloud computing capacity globally.

Cloud computing company AWS services hundreds of thousands

of businesses worldwide.

There are ridesharing applications

using AWS, game companies,

device manufacturers,

your Fortune 500 companies, powered by Amazon.

AWS is so powerful that even government agencies use AWS.

As well as America's FBI and CIA,

UK government departments rely on AWS,

including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ,

with the Home Office signing a £120 million deal.

AWS is so large that economies are based upon the way

in which they use the Amazon services for their country.

That makes Jeff Bezos super powerful.

All of those tentacles that reach out into all of those areas,

what it means is that he has a kind of godlike view across the economy.

This is a corporation that embodies his vision more so

than any other founder and corporation out there.

It's really unlike anything we've ever seen

in terms of monopoly power.

The political power that comes with is tremendous,

and that is why they're able to get governments to dance to their tune.

But 2019 was really a turning point.

Lawmakers in Washington finally took action against Amazon.

Congress launched a major investigation

into the tech industry's alleged monopoly power.

Their ability to dictate terms, call the shots,

upend entire sectors, and inspire fear

represent the powers of a private government.

Our founders would not bow before a king,

nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.

I don't know whether or not people are afraid of Jeff Bezos,

but they ought to be very, very angry

about the business practices of Amazon.

In 2007, Mr Spence received...

Central to the investigation was Amazon's relationship

with small businesses.

Our witness is David Barnett.

He's founder and CEO of PopSockets LLC.

So today I want to talk about two challenges

that we've had with Amazon.

One involving counterfeits, the other involving bullying.

Barnett went public with allegations that Amazon threatened

ever greater fees.

Another threat might be, "We've got too much inventory on our hands,

"so we're going to ship it all back to you.

"You're going to pay for all the fees.

"So really, we need the money."

He spoke about the horrific behaviour of Amazon

that attempted to bully him into providing more revenue to Amazon

with no justification.

I think Mr Bezos in particular is very unaccustomed

to having to justify any of his conduct

and was not interested in coming before Congress

and answering questions under oath.

For two months, Bezos refused to appear,

but was forced to under threat of a subpoena.

He addressed PopSockets' allegations that Amazon demanded ¤1.8 million

in order to remove fake products.

What is your explanation for that business practice?

If those are the facts, that is unacceptable

and I will look into that

and we'll get back to your office with that.

Jeff Bezos said that he would look into it and get back to Congress.

To my knowledge, he hasn't.

Many small companies have told us

during this year-long investigation that they were mistreated,

abused and tossed aside by Amazon.

So, Mr Bezos, this is one of your partners.

Why on earth would they compare your company to a drug dealer?

Sir, I have great respect for you in this committee,

but I completely disagree with that characterisation.

Isn't it an inherent conflict of interest for Amazon to produce

and sell products on its platform that compete directly

with third party sellers, particularly when you, Amazon,

set the rules of the game?

No, I don't believe it is.

We have, we have... The consumer is the one ultimately

making the decisions.

They're making the decisions about what to buy,

what price to buy it at, who to buy it from,

and our...what we try to do... That's not the question, Mr Bezos.

The question is, is there an inherent conflict of interest?

Mr Bezos, did you personally sign off on the plan to raise prices

after Amazon limited its competition?

I don't remember that at all.

I found Jeff Bezos interested mostly in getting out of the hearing

without answering the questions.

Please raise your right hand.

Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury...?

The hearings took a dramatic turn

when an Amazon executive took the stand.

Let me answer... Can I remind you, sir, you're under oath? Yes.

Thank you for your question.

We use data to serve our customers,

and to clarify my question, we don't use individual seller data

to directly compete with them.

And again, similarly, with respect to some of the... Do you use...?

Let me just... Do you use consumer data to favour Amazon products?

Amazon repeatedly told Congress, on the record,

we do not give preference to our own brands,

and that is the lie that Congress caught them in.

It is not against the law to preference your own brands.

It is against the law to lie to Congress about it.

Thank you very much, Congressman.

Cicilline accused Amazon of criminally misleading Congress

and took the unprecedented step of referring it

to the Department of Justice.

An untruthful statement is a very serious matter.

If the Department of Justice makes a determination that a witness

was untruthful, they can face a jail sentence.

Amazon denies it lied to the committee

and the attorney general is still investigating.

But not long after he appeared in front of Congress,

Bezos resigned as Amazon CEO.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Amazon asked Jeff Bezos

to step down after that testimony to Congress.

It's pretty clear that they wanted somebody else

to be the face of the company.

As well as record layoffs at Amazon in January,

employee protests are spreading.

In the UK, workers are striking for the first time,

demanding better conditions...

..and Chris Smalls is pushing to create more unions in the US.

We're hoping that we'll be able to expand into, you know,

all across the nation.

Chris Smalls stood up to Amazon

and he's won a major battle in that fight,

at the same moment that we have Congress moving

towards passing major tech legislation.

This battle between the big tech companies

and those that are trying to bring real change here

is the battle of David and Goliath.

We all have to be David.

You know, it's not just one David.

All the workers coming together.

So this is not an easy fight, but it's a fight we're going to win.

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