The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
For Amazon, it’s business as usual despite CEO drama
NEW YORK >> First it was a heartwrenching tweet that he and his wife were getting a divorce after 25 years. Then a tabloid revealed that he’d been having an affair, releasing texts and photos of him and his mistress.
As if either of those weren’t distracting enough, now Jeff Bezos — the world’s richest man and CEO of Amazon — is accusing The National Enquirer in a blog post of trying to blackmail him by threatening to release more intimate photos of him unless he calls off an investigation into how that information was obtained in the first place.
But despite the all-consuming personal drama, analysts and experts don’t expect it to make much difference to Amazon itself, the company Bezos has steered from an online bookstore two decades ago to a worldwide juggernaut.
Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates the impact on the company to be “0.000 percent.”
“I’m certain investors won’t care,” he said.
Others point out that Bezos has been able to balance his responsibilities at the helm of the world’s largest online retailer while also juggling his other pursuits: running a space exploration company and owning the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most influential newspapers.
“He’s extraordinarily driven,” says Chris McCabe, who used to work at Amazon and now runs ecommerceChris, a consultancy for Amazon sellers. “He knows how to delegate.”
Amazon has a steady line of longtime executives who are running each of its businesses, likely keeping investors calm.
Jeffrey Wilke, oversees the retail business, and Andrew Jassy runs the company’s fast-growing cloud computing business Amazon Web Services. Both of them have been at the company since the 1990s. And
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