Weirdly enough, there’s been at least three different writers I enjoy reading who describe Jeff as “hyperintelligent”.

The first is Steve Yegge. From Amazon War Story #1: Jeff Bezos:

To prepare a presentation for Jeff, first make damn sure you know everything there is to know about the subject. Then write a prose narrative explaining the problem and solution(s). Write it exactly the way you would write it for a leading professor or industry expert on the subject.

That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have groundbreakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material.

You’re almost done. The last step before you’re ready to present to him is this: Delete every third paragraph.

Now you’re ready to present!

Back in the mid-1800s there was this famous-ish composer/pianist named Franz Liszt. He is widely thought to have been the greatest sight-reader who ever lived. He could sight-read anything you gave him, including crazy stuff not even written for piano, like opera scores. He was so staggeringly good at sight-reading that his brain was only fully engaged on the first run-through. After that he’d get bored and start embellishing with his own additions.

Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first realization about him. Who knows how smart he was before he became a billionaire — let’s just assume it was “really frigging smart”, since he did build Amazon from scratch. But for years he’s had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he’s really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He’s like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations.

So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

But how do you prepare a presentation for a giant-brained alien? Well, here’s my second realization: He will outsmart you. Knowing everything about your subject is only a first-line defense for you. It’s like armor that he’ll eat through in the first few minutes. He is going to have at least one deep insight about the subject, right there on the spot, and it’s going to make you look like a complete buffoon.

Trust me folks, I saw this happen time and again, for years. Jeff Bezos has all these incredibly intelligent, experienced domain experts surrounding him at huge meetings, and on a daily basis he thinks of shit that they never saw coming. It’s a guaranteed facepalm fest.

So I knew he was going to think of something that I hadn’t. I didn’t know what it might be, because I’d spent weeks trying to think of everything. I had reviewed the material with dozens of people. But it didn’t matter. I knew he was going to blindside me, because that’s what happens when you present to Jeff.

(The quote ended up a bit longer than I thought, because I couldn’t resist Yegge’s entertaining style.)

The second is Brad Stone, who wrote The Everything Store. Quote:

Toward the end of the hour we spent discussing this book, Bezos leaned forward on his elbows and asked, “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?” 

Ah yes, of course, the narrative fallacy. For a moment, I experienced the same sweaty surge of panic every Amazon employee over the past two decades has felt when confronted with an unanticipated question from the hyperintelligent
boss. The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species’ tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives. These stories, Taleb wrote, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck  that plays into all successes and failures. Bezos was suggesting that Amazon’s rise might be that sort of impossibly  complex story. There was no easy explanation for how certain products were  invented, such as Amazon Web Services, its pioneering cloud business that so  many other Internet companies now use to run their operations. “When a  company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,”  Bezos said. Reducing Amazon’s history to a simple narrative, he worried, could  give the impression of clarity rather than the real thing.  

To be fair, Brad also uses the same descriptive of Joy Covey, but I doubt anyone who knew her would disagree (Eugene Wei for instance, who was interviewed by both Jeff and Joy, puts them in the same sentence):

Another new arrival was Joy Covey as chief financial officer. Driven and often intimidating to underlings, Covey became an intellectual foil to Bezos and a key architect of Amazon’s early expansion. She had an unconventional background. A hyperintelligent but alienated child from San Mateo, California, she had run away from home when she was a sophomore in high school and worked as a grocery-store clerk in Fresno. She entered Cal State, Fresno, at age seventeen, graduated in two years, and then took the exam to become a certified public accountant at age nineteen, notching the second-highest score in the nation without studying. She later earned a joint business and law degree from Harvard. When Bezos found her, she was the thirty-three-year-old chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley digital-audio company called Digidesign. 

Over the next few years, Covey remained so intensely focused on executing  Bezos’s “get big fast” imperative that everything else in her life became  background noise. One morning she parked her car in the office garage and was  so distracted that she inadvertently left it running—all day. That evening, she  couldn’t find her car keys, concluded she had lost them, and went home without  her car. The security guard in the garage called her a few hours later and told her  that she might want to come back to the office to retrieve her still-idling vehicle. 

Another Brad quote on Jeff:

Right or wrong, Bezos’s behavior was often easier to accept because he was so frequently on target with his criticisms, to the amazement and often irritation of employees. Bruce Jones, the former Amazon vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team working to create algorithms to optimize pickers’  movements in the fulfillment centers while the company was trying to solve the  problem of batches. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented  their work to Bezos and the S Team. “We had beautiful documents and everyone  was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,”  stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard.  

“He had no background in control theory, no background in operating  systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution  centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out  his argument on the whiteboard and “every stinking thing he put down was  correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove  he was wrong but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had  this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing  to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.” 

The third, most recent, is Eugene Wei, from Compress to impress:

Even with modern communication infrastructure, however, any modern CEO deals with amplification and distortion issues with any message. Humans learn about this problem very early on by playing telephone or operator, or what I just learned is more canonically known outside the U.S. as Chinese whispers. One person whispers a message in another person’s ear, and it’s passed on down the line to see if the original phrase can survive intact to the last person in the chain. Generally, errors accumulate along the way and what makes it to the end is some shockingly defective copy of the original.

Despite learning this lesson early on, most people in leadership positions still underestimate just how pervasive this problem is. This is why any manager or executive is familiar with how much time they spend on communicating the same things to different groups in the organization. It feels like it’s all you do sometimes, and yet you still encounter people who feel like they’re in the dark.

I hadn’t read Jeff Bezos’ most recent letter to shareholders until today, but it was just what I’d expect of it given something I observed in my seven years there, which are now more than a decade in the rear view mirror. In fact, one of reasons I hadn’t read it yet was that I suspected it would be very familiar, and it was. The other thing I suspected was that it would be really concise and memorable, and again, it was.

I suspect that very early on in his career as CEO, Jeff noticed the Chinese whispers problem as the company scaled. Anyone who is lucky enough to lead a successful company very quickly senses the impossibility of scaling one’s own time to all corners of the organization, but Jeff was laser focused on the more serious problem that presented, that of maintaining consistent strategy in all important decisions, many of which were made outside his purview each day. At scale, maintaining strategic alignment feels like an organizational design problem, but much of the impact of organizational design is centered around how it impacts information flow.

This problem is made more vexing by not just the telephone game issue but by the human inability to carry around a whole lot of directives in their minds. Jeff could spend a ton of time in All Hands meetings or with his direct reports and other groups inside Amazon, explaining his thinking in excruciating detail and hoping it sank in, but then he’d never have any time to do anything else.

Thankfully, humans have developed ways to ensure the integrity of messages persists across time when transmitted through the lossy mediums of oral tradition and hierarchical organizations.

One of these is to encode you message in a very distinctive format. There are many rhetorical tricks that have stood the test of time, like alliteration or anadiplosis. Perhaps supreme among these rhetorical forms is verse, especially when it rhymes. Both the rhythm and the rhyme (alliteration intentional) allow humans to compress and recall a message with greater accuracy than prose.

I never chatted with Bezos about this, so I don’t know if it was an explicit strategy on his part, but one of his great strengths as a communicator was the ability to encode the most important strategies for Amazon in very concise and memorable forms.

Go back even further, and there are dozens of examples of Bezos codifying key ideas for maximum recall. For example, every year I was at Amazon had a theme (reminiscent of how David Foster Wallace imagined in Infinite Jest that in the future corporate sponsors could buy the rights to name years). These themes were concise and memorable ways to help everyone remember the most important goal of the company that year.

One year, when our primary goal was to grow our revenue and order volume as quickly as possible to achieve the economies of scale that would capitalize on our high fixed cost infrastructure investments and put wind into our flywheel, the theme was “Get Big Fast Baby.” You can argue whether the “baby” at the end was necessary, but I think it’s more memorable with it than without. Much easier to remember than “Grow revenues 80%” or “achieve economies of scale” or something like that. …

I could continue on through the years, but what stands out is that I can recite these from memory even now, over a decade later, and so could probably everyone who worked at Amazon those years.

Here’s a good test of how strategically aligned a company is. Walk up to anyone in the company in the hallway and ask them if they know what their current top priority or mission is. Can they recite it from memory?

What Jeff understood was the power of rhetoric. Time spent coming up with the right words to package a key concept in a memorable way was time well spent. People fret about what others say about them when they’re not in the room, but Jeff was solving the issue of getting people to say what he’d say when he wasn’t in the room.

It was so important to him that we even had company-wide contests to come up with the most memorable ways to name our annual themes. One year Jeff announced at an All Hands meeting that someone I knew, Barnaby Dorfman, had won the contest. Jeff said the prize was that he’d buy something off the winner’s Amazon wish list, but after pulling Barnaby’s wish list up in front of the whole company on the screen, he said he didn’t think any of the items was good enough so instead he went over to the product page for image stabilized binoculars from Canon, retailing for over $1000, and bought those instead.

I have a list of dozens of Jeff sayings filed away in memory, and I’m not alone. It’s one reason he’s one of the world’s most effective CEO’s. What’s particularly impressive is that Jeff is so brilliant that it would be easy for him to state his thinking in complex ways that us mere mortals wouldn’t grok. But true genius is stating the complex simply.

Ironically, Jeff employs the reverse of this for his own information inflows. It’s well known that he banned Powerpoint at Amazon because he was increasingly frustrated at the lossy nature that medium. As Edward Tufte has long railed against, Powerpoint encourage people to reduce their thinking to a series of bullet points. Whenever someone would stand up in front of Jeff to present, Jeff would have rifled through to the end of the presentation before they would’ve finished a handful of slides, and Jeff would just jump in and start asking questions about slide 35 when someone was still talking to slide 3.

As a hyper intelligent person, Jeff didn’t want lossy compression or lazy thinking, he wanted the raw feed in a structured form, and so we all shifted to writing our arguments out as essays that he’d read silently in meetings. Written language is a lossy format, too, but it has the advantage of being less forgiving of broken logic flows than slide decks.

To summarize, Jeff’s outbound feedback was carefully encoded and compressed for maximum fidelity of transmission across hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world, but his inbound data feed was raw and minimally compressed. In structure, this pattern resembles what a great designer or photographer does. Find the most elegant and stable output from a complex universe of inputs.

(That quote ended up being long because I thought Eugene was very insightful throughout.)

Another Eugene Wei quote, from this article:

If Amazon has so many businesses that do make a profit, then why is it still showing quarterly losses, and why has even free cash flow decreased in recent years?

Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail. This is one area where the press and pundits accept Amazon’s statements at face value.

Given that giant mission, Amazon has decided to continue to invest to arm itself for a much larger scale of business. If it were purely a software business, its fixed cost investments for this journey would be lower, but the amount of capital required to grow a business that has to ship millions of packages to customers all over the world quickly is something only a handful of companies in the world could even afford. Joey Chestnut doesn’t just wake up one day and win the Coney Island hot dog eating contest every year, he has to spend months of training to prepare his digestive system for the feat.

Amazon has seen that lowering its shipping costs and increasing the speed of shipping items to customers is like a shot of adrenaline to customers’ propensity to buy from them, and so it has doubled down on building more and more fulfillment centers around the world. When I joined Amazon it had one fulfillment center. Today it has dozens just in the U.S. alone, and I would not be surprised if it has more than 100 fulfillment centers worldwide now.

That is a gargantuan investment, billions of dollars’ worth, and it takes a significant bite out of Amazon’s free cash flow. Add in its investments in infrastructure to support a growing AWS client base, and Amazon has again hiked its fixed cost base to a higher plateau. But for Amazon this is nothing new, it’s just the same typeface bolded.

I’m convinced Amazon could easily turn a quarterly profit now. Many times in its history, it could have been content to stop investing in new product lines, new fulfillment centers, new countries. The fixed cost base would flatten out, its sales would continue growing for some period of time and then flatten out, and it would harvest some annuity of profits. Even the first year I joined Amazon in 1997, when it was just a domestic book business, it could have been content to rest on its laurels.

But Jeff is not wired that way. There are very few people in technology and business who are what I’d call apex predators. Jeff is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I’ve met in my life. An apex predator doesn’t wake up one day and decide it is done hunting. Right now I envision only one throttle to Jeff’s ambitions and it is human mortality, but I would not be surprised if one day he announced he’d started another side project with Peter Thiel to work on a method of achieving immortality.

And now for a complete tangent.

Reading about Bezos and Musk in Tim Fernholz’s Rocket Billionaires book makes me feel like my childhood dream of going to space may just become true before I die, due to the these guys’ efforts to make it semi-affordable. I don’t mind saving for years for the chance to go on such a trip.

I also like that Bezos is a fan of O’Neill cylinders:

Bezos is unabashed in his fanaticism for Star Trek and its many spin-offs. He has a holding company called Zefram, which honors the character who invented warp drive. He persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official. He named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate. As time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique. A friend once said that Bezos adopted his strenuous fitness regimen in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”

Most mortals eventually jettison teenage dreams, but Bezos remains passionately committed to his, even as he has come to control more and more of the here and now. Critics have chided him for philanthropic stinginess, at least relative to his wealth, but the thing Bezos considers his primary humanitarian contribution isn’t properly charitable. It’s a profit-seeking company called Blue Origin, dedicated to fulfilling the prophecy of his high-school graduation speech. He funds that venture—which builds rockets, rovers, and the infrastructure that permits voyage beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year. More than his ownership of his behemoth company or of The Washington Post—and more than the $2 billion he’s pledged to nonprofits working on homelessness and education for low-income Americans—Bezos calls Blue Origin his “most important work.”

He considers the work so important because the threat it aims to counter is so grave. What worries Bezos is that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. The danger, he says, “is not necessarily extinction,” but stasis: “We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future.” While others might fret that climate change will soon make the planet uninhabitable, the billionaire wrings his hands over the prospects of diminished growth. But the scenario he describes is indeed grim. Without enough energy to go around, rationing and starvation will ensue. Over the years, Bezos has made himself inaccessible to journalists asking questions about Amazon. But he shares his faith in space colonization with a preacher’s zeal: “We have to go to space to save Earth.”

At the heart of this faith is a text Bezos read as a teen. In 1976, a Princeton physicist named Gerard K. O’Neill wrote a populist case for moving into space called The High Frontier, a book beloved by sci-fi geeks, NASA functionaries, and aging hippies. As a Princeton student, Bezos attended O’Neill seminars and ran the campus chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Through Blue Origin, Bezos is developing detailed plans for realizing O’Neill’s vision.

The professor imagined colonies housed in miles-long cylindrical tubes floating between Earth and the moon. The tubes would sustain a simulacrum of life back on the mother planet, with soil, oxygenated air, free-flying birds, and “beaches lapped by waves.” When Bezos describes these colonies—and presents artists’ renderings of them—he sounds almost rapturous. “This is Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes.” Since the colonies would allow the human population to grow without any earthly constraints, the species would flourish like never before: “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.” Bezos rallies the public with passionate peroration and convincing command of detail.