Worst-Case Scenario: Amazon

ESG: Why Jeff Bezos' media play makes me think of Jared Kushner

Jennifer Garner, Jeff Bezos, and Lauren Sanchez in 2021. (Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Baby2Baby)

It’s crazy to think that Amazon launched their first digital video efforts back in the 2006. That’s 16 years ago!

And how is that business doing? Whenever anyone asks this, the response is usually a shrug and a “I don’t know, but Amazon is doing really well! So they must be doing something right.”

That doesn’t really work for me.

Let me make an analogy: say you have a kid whose dad is a billionaire on paper. (Probably a several hundred millionaire in reality, particularly over the last few weeks.) The kid doesn’t try hard in school. Or work hard. But the dad donates millions of dollars to an Ivy League campus, and his kid gets in. This kid then marries another (on paper) billionaire’s famous child. His father-in-law manages to become president, and he is given the job to solve the Middle East peace crisis. This hypothetical person fails, but after he leaves the White House, he sets up a private equity firm that raises billions of assets under management. (The funds coming from Saudi Arabia is a story not nearly enough people heard about.)