5 ms·
A good day with Jeff Bezos
- ggm 3y agoAnother instance of "no, you cannot comprehend how the superrich live, it's just different"
- WilTimSon 3y agoI'm positively baffled by the stereo bit. He had this really impressive thing built, was really happy someone noticed it and yet didn't play a thing on it? Not even some presentation audio, just to show off? Such a bizarre mix of showing off yet trying not to show off. I feel like most people, when they come into possession of something they consider cool, would jump out of their socks at the chance to show it to their guests.
- prepend 3y agoIt was during the lunch time during a short conversation. There likely wasn’t time to play anything without soaking up a lot of time. Also, I’ve met lots of audio people who seem to like the design of the system more than actually listening to music. If this was a dinner party, I’d expect a demo and playing music to show it off. But for a lunch break at a work meeting to basically a stranger, it seems to make sense that he didn’t play anything.
- karaterobot 3y agoI mean, it's a company meeting unrelated to music, why would he show off his stereo? And if he'd done that, there would be a story about how "Jeff Bezos' stereo costs more than I make in five years, and he made a bunch of employees listen to it in his boat house". Not saying the author of this article would have written it, but somebody would.
- lupire 3y agoThe story says he did show off the stereo, but didn't turn it on
- karaterobot 3y agoThe story says he was happy to talk about it when the author complimented it.
- omoikane 3y agoThere might not have been anything worth playing because Jeff Bezos might not have been a music person. According to "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone: Bezos's colleagues and friends often attribute Amazon's tardiness in digital music to Bezos's lack of interest in music of any kind [...] Colleagues remember that on the solemn road trip from Target's offices in Minneapolis after 9/11, Bezos indiscriminately grabbed stacks of CDs from the bargain rack of a convenience store, as if they were all interchangeable.
- lupire 3y agoThat's weird. Obviously he understands the commercial value of music and how a consumer needs a lot of it.
- nicbou 3y agoI always wonder how infinite money would upend my system of values.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago"The Rich are Different" The lesser-known little book of quotations by Jon Winokur. Appropriately enough on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Are-Different-Priceless-Quotations/dp/067944386X https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Are-Different-Priceless-Quotatio... >the elite members of San Francisco's Union Pacific Club needn't worry about handling dirty money, since every coin the enters the institution is scoured by the kitchen staff. >When the late Time Warner boss Steve Ross flew his wife and two other couples to Mexico one Christmas, the trip required two corporate planes: One for people and one for gifts. >Christina Onassis used to have Diet Coke flown to her by private jet. >Asked why she was carried everywhere by a burly attendant, Barbara Hutton replied, "Why should I walk when I can hire someone to do it for me?"
- ghoshbishakh 3y ago"The winding road to his home was lined with black-suited, white-shirted, matching security guards, all equipped with matching sunglasses and earpieces." -- Do all super rich people live with this level of security?
- super256 3y agoI know that the Albrecht brothers (Aldi) were running around without security for decades, Meckerle (Ratiopharm) did so too until his suicide due to the Volkswagen short squeeze and financial crisis, and Dieter Schwarz (Lidl) still does today.
- lancebeet 3y agoI remember seeing a DW documentary a couple of years ago about how differently billionaires behave in Germany compared to the US ("The discreet lives of the super rich" was its name apparently). If one accepts the basic premise of the documentary (that the German billionaires avoid flaunting their wealth and strive to maintain privacy), it might explain why billionaires in Germany could live their lives without security while it would be unthinkable for their American counterparts.
- boeingUH60 3y agoEven in America, there are many discreet billionaires that’ll likely not need round-the-clock security. Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the likes are high profile…but I don’t think anyone will notice if Jeff Yass or Jay Chaudhry walks on the street.
- neilv 3y agoYears ago, I saw one of the household-name tech billionaires on the sidewalk in Cambridge, Mass., with (I think) their spouse, no security in sight. It's not LA or NYC for celebrity saturation, but a lot of rich & famous people come through Cambridge/Boston (and their kids often go to school here), and nobody cares.
- throwawaymeta01 3y agoweird. but I guess that's what the story was supposed to signal. my experiences during product demos showed jeff had a great knack for asking the right questions and being able to dive into meaningful details.
- stagger87 3y ago"Yea yea yea he's an asshole, but I got to go to his boathouse!"
- dang 3y ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- ajkjk 3y agoI could listen to weird stories about people who've brushed shoulders with the super-rich all day. I'd especially love to hear stories of winning their respect. Surely somebody wins Bezos' respect -- unless (and it doesn't seem unlikely) his defining property is being too arrogant for that?
- june_twenty 3y agoMy favorite part of this story is that someone like Steve Yegge didn't contribute much to the conversation.
- jmuguy 3y agoI used to do a lot of IT work for the CEO of a client company and would visit his house often. He moved into a new house and in the garage had several lifts installed for his cars. And I was talking to the guy who installed the lifts and explaining that I didn’t know CEO worked on his cars and he explained that CEO probably doesn’t - there was some fad at the time and all the rich guys around town were getting these lifts installed. He said he had so much business he had to hire on a bunch of new people.
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- kamaal 3y agoSpending your money is a way of spending your time(expended to acquire the money), so you want to spend as much as you can leaving 0 or at least keep towards 0 as you age. Anything else and it would feel like you are dying early. Im guessing, once you are in the downswing of life(>40 years) you want to enjoy your money(especially when you have lots of it), because by that definition its also a way of life extension in a biological context where death is inevitable. So you want as many trophy things as possible. You don't even have to be a billionaire for this. Non trivial millions will pretty much leave you in the same state.
- uptownfunk 3y agoMy favorite clip of Bezos is him totally ignoring Shatner feeling overwhelmed with emotion and wonder after the rocket launch. Have you ever seen someone more exposed https://youtu.be/xrX1a0oqa9g https://youtu.be/xrX1a0oqa9g
- neilv 3y agoIIRC, there was more that happened before that bit, in which Bezos came off as more empathetic and sharing the moment with Shatner, and then only later also engaged more with the people there who wanted to pop champagne. People who saw only the footage from a videographer who missed much of it, or which was edited cynically, got an inaccurate impression. (Shatner was understandably moved by the space flight experience, maybe by something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect )
- rhtgrg 3y ago> there was more that happened before that bit It was after this bit. Probably when Bezos realized the optics. > or which was edited cynically, got an inaccurate impression Ironic to be posting an inaccurate comment, while lamenting inaccuracy... Here, you can see just how early this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSNXBvpLb9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSNXBvpLb9o
- neilv 3y agoMaybe I saw a deceptive edit at the time. But note that, in CNN video you linked, there's a cut shortly after 1m26s, before the audio and then video of Shatner&Bezos. I can't tell how much of the interaction was missed.
- neilv 3y agoThis ABC footage feels different than the outrage edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTxbq7MTQYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTxbq7MTQYY Bezos listens to an overwhelmed Shatner for close to 10 minutes, hugs, etc. It may be that he was suddenly thinking of "optics", as someone said, or maybe he wasn't.
- golemotron 3y agoI was hoping the story would be interesting in some way.
- vsareto 3y ago>The purpose of the offsite was to bring Amazon’s technical thought leaders together to figure out if we could use machine learning to help us with systems operations. How often do technical leaders get rounded up and asked to pitch ideas with little research beforehand?
- lupire 3y agoAmazon has brainstorming parties, before the research starts. I did one where a bunch of random ICs were locked in a room for an hour and told to make up ideas to patent. My group patented an auto parts picker.
- WalterBright 3y agoA briefly famous person lived nearby me once. The paparazzi would sometimes camp out in their cars in the street. I'd stop by and tell them they have the wrong street, the person actually lived a couple streets over.
- danielvf 3y agoThe blog post is full of very specific clues - enough to narrow it down to one house. I went on Google Street View to see if the mentioned "white rock" was still there. It looks like now there are two white rocks! https://goo.gl/maps/TdcRicMBjCMY6sw47 https://goo.gl/maps/TdcRicMBjCMY6sw47
- omoikane 3y agoI tried the same thing but didn't notice any rocks, so I just did a regular search and found: https://www.businessinsider.com/where-billionaires-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-live-photos-of-medina-washington-2017-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/where-billionaires-bill-gate...
- danielvf 3y agoConfirms I found the correct place on street view then.
- giarc 3y agoFunny that the admin would give vague instructions that anyone could figure out in a heartbeat. Why not just give the address?
- dangerwill 3y agoSo I like to take absurdly long walks in Seattle and one time I walked the length of the 520 bridge over to Bellevue, and walked through Medina while doing so because I thought it was odd to have a part of Seattle named after a holy site in Saudi Arabia and I wanted to see what kind of community was there. Lo and behold I pretty quickly see it is a place of unbelievable wealth and I feel like a weird, poor interloper walking though in shorts and a t shirt and very sweaty from walking in the sun all day. And yep, I passed by that exact house. I half-seriously wonder if I'm in some private security company's database from that day.
- abledon 3y ago> We never did get to listen to it, though. Lunch ended and we went back to the meeting perfect ending sentence. sums up the trope of the time-starved billionaire businessmen
- nagonago 3y agoInteresting story, but if this story was supposed to portray Bezos as a "perfectly ordinary everyday dude", it certainly didn't give me that impression.