Brad Stone is somewhat of an Amazon junkie. In Amazon Unbound, his second book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos, Stone pick up from where he left The Everything Store, covering Amazon’s journey through the 2010s.

The book is divided into 15 in-depth chapters that talk about Alexa, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and much more. Alexa may be a household product today, but in the formative years, it had multiple teams working in silos, trying to get the technical aspects right. Bezos was obsessed with bringing voice-based AI into people’s homes and perhaps our lives are all the more convenient for it.

Stone talks about launching Amazon Go, the acquisition of Whole Foods, and a chapter entitled ‘Amazon is CraP, CRaP standing for ‘Can't Realize a Profit. There is a chapter on the profitability of AWS; Amazon uses seller data to increase their own sales and the genius behind implementing their advertising engine which soared company profits and valuation.

It’s not that Amazon had a smooth road. There were constant disputes with the US and EU governments around competition laws, their battle with the state of New York for “H2Q” and with the state of Washington for “ Day1”, and a lawsuit around Amazon hurting and killing small retailers.

Stone talks about Bezos’ personal life too - his Twitter battle with former President Donald Trump, especially about The Washington Post. Trump thought that Bezos was using The Washington Post to promote Amazon and not to support ethical journalism while Bezos defended himself by ____.

The race to space and the competition with Elon Musk, Bezos’ affair with Lauren Sanchez, and her brother Michael Sanchez playing double agent - are all controversies mentioned in Stone’s book. Perhaps the most interesting anecdote is of Saudi Prince MBS sending malicious texts to Bezos’ WhatsApp number.

The pandemic may have killed many businesses, but Amazon grew to a 1.6 trillion market cap and Jeff Bezos's personal wealth grew by 70%, though many say it was at the cost of workers in fulfillment centers.

But despite our personal opinion, negative or positive, of the company and the man, the truth is that they control much of our consumer behavior and economic reality. Now there is no turning back from Bezos’ global empire.