by: Cameron MacKenzie
There's a classic scene in Scorcese's film Gangs of New York, when Bill the Butcher wakes up the young Amsterdam to thank him for saving Bill's life the night before. Bill sits in a rocking chair, shirtless and wrapped in the American flag. As he reflects on his own mortality, he remembers an epic battle he had as a young man with a character known as The Priest. Beaten to a pulp by the Priest, Bill says that he couldn't bring himself to look his rival in the eye. "This was a great man," Bill insists. Bill was so ashamed he said, that when he got home, "I cut out the eye that looked away." When they next met in battle, Bill killed The Priest, and became a great man himself. And as he tells this story to the angry young man in front of him, Bill suspects he might have found the next great man, the man who will have to kill him for the crown.
I couldn't help but think of this scene, dripping as it is with machismo and doom, when I heard that Jeff Bezos had decided to step down as the head of Amazon. Bezos was the master of the universe, the richest man in the world (for a hot minute), and the CEO of one of the most impactful companies in history. And then he decided to leave. Why did he do it? Did he want to spend more time with his family? Probably not. Was he afraid of unions? Of the EU? Of Elizabeth Warren? I don't think so. You can't tell me this guy would back down from a fight.
Bobby Bowden, the great Florida State football coach, was once asked why he ran up the scores on lesser opponents. Bowden answered that a sprinter doesn't slow down when he's ahead in a race. But a sprinter doesn't take his foot off the gas because there is a finish line, and he can see it. Where's the finish line for a business? Every financial quarter is live or die, and I would bet that someone like Bezos feeds off that energy. If you fight and claw to get to the top, you work around the clock, you ignore everyone who tells you you can't do it, and then you do it, then what?
Well, you could become like Bill, always looking for the next battle, for whoever's going to get your blood going, knowing all the while that if you're living by the sword, you're going to end up dying by it as well. Eventually you're going to get too old or too lazy or too clumsy to change and some day, a faster gun is going to come along, and you'll be toast. Bezos said it himself: "One day," he told employees in 2018, "Amazon will go bankrupt." Bezos knows how that cycle runs, and he apparently doesn't want to wait around for it.
This demonstrates a level of self-awareness that the silicon CEOs are slowly beginning to demonstrate. While Steve Jobs nearly died at his desk and Bill Gates tried to retire for ten years, other founders like Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Larry Ellison have recently shown that the tech gods can gracefully find the exit, and spend more time focusing on what it is they really want to do. Ellison won an America's Cup. Brin and Page are busy pushing us toward the Singularity.
After all, Bezos's side hustles are becoming legendary. He owns the Washington Post. He's battling climate change. He could spend an entire second career on either of these projects, or he could simply put his feet up and relax - take some well-deserved time off.
Or Bezos could, as he's hinted, focus his unique intensity on a field where the man who knocked him off his perch as the richest man alive is currently cornering the market. Now, here might be somebody who could really get Bezos's blood going. I don't think Jeff Bezos is going to stop living by the sword any time soon, I think he's just looking for a new fight.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.