Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (10 page)

Sounds so logical. What did his boss say? ‘He said that seems like a pretty good idea, but an even better idea for someone that didn’t already have a good job! Hahaha!’ His huge laugh booms round the tall room. If you worked for Bezos, you wouldn’t want open-plan.

In fact, his main base now is a converted hospital in Seattle, great views to the mountains, room for 800 staff. He has a small office on a middle floor, furnished with a door desk like everyone else. A door desk?

‘Yeah, an old door on 4x4s,’ – trestles to us – ‘we all have ’em.’

Why?

‘Big and sturdy and cheap.’

Isn’t that a bit pretentious for the CEO, too?

‘No, because symbols are important and good symbols are not pretentious.’

Nicely answered.

‘Thanks, hahaha.’

Later he tells me one of the things he hated about a stint at Bankers Trust – sounds like a banker to me – was the way furniture became a symbol of status, typifying how inward-looking the organization was. ‘That was where I learnt what a credenza was. A little desk with drawers
thin enough to hold one sheet of paper. If you qualified for one, you must be important. I mean …’

So here he is now, the man with the logical dotcom idea that’s grown and survived the crash and is just beginning to make money (first profit in last quarter of 2001), who’s got a wife and two little boys and a beautiful home on the lake a mile down from Bill Gates, and appears on Oprah Winfrey as her favourite entrepreneur and gives to her charity and works on a door desk and seems so unspoilt by it all. Why him?

‘I dunno,’ he says, methodically chasing the last walnut round his plate, ‘but I think the essence of entrepreneurship is a strange combination of being flexible and stubborn. Successful entrepreneurs are both, simultaneously – the trick is knowing when to be flexible and when stubborn.’

So when is he stubborn? Over his father, for one thing. His parents divorced when he was one, and he never saw his dad again. His mother remarried and he calls his stepfather, a Cuban-born oil engineer, 33 years at Exxon, his ‘real dad’.

No interest in contacting his – as he calls him – ‘biological’ father? No, and it’s cost him not a dollar in therapy fees, he laughs. That’s stubborn.

Bezos is also meticulous – he turns over his sea bass to squeeze lemon juice first on one side, then the other – and undaunted by what the rest of us just wouldn’t attempt.

He attributes that to his maternal grandparents, who ran a ranch in Texas. He spent summers there as a kid. ‘They were very self-reliant, miles from the nearest city. Granddad did his own vet work, fixed old bulldozers.’

And now he’s comfortable with the iconic status he’s achieved, the endless media attention?

‘Yeah, it’s OK with me,’ he says, chewing. ‘I mean, nobody likes answering the same questions 10,000 times, it’s just dull. But hey, this is more fun than most interviews because you’re asking me some new questions.’

What do you normally get asked? ‘Like, when are you going to be profitable? My mom has a framed
Newsweek
article from 1996 saying that it will take at least five years for us to be profitable. I don’t know whether people don’t remember, don’t listen or just aren’t interested.’

His mother and stepfather, his brother, who runs a small advertising agency, and his sister, who has recently moved to Seattle, all own stock
in Amazon. Bezos himself has close to 30 per cent. That made him very rich when it hit its peak at $113 a share, and he is still a dollar billionaire now with the share price below $20. He shrugs.

‘Pannacotta with raspberries, I’ll take some of that and a latte with skimmed milk,’ he grins at the waiter. What next? He talks about the changes in technology uptake that could benefit Amazon but no firm predictions: the businesses that run on one forecast, he says, always screw up.

‘You’re better being able to deal with lots of scenarios. Boy,’ he adds, spooning up the pannacotta, ‘this is good!’

And his working hours? ‘I do 60 a week, any less I get bored, any more, tired. I mean, what do people do who do less? How do they fill the time?’

Family, hobbies, television. He frowns, as if he doesn’t quite understand.

Doesn’t he watch
Frasier
, set in Seattle?

‘No, never seen it.’

And books, the bedrock of his business? He gets them passed on by his wife MacKenzie, who has been writing a novel for nearly a decade. Is he in it? ‘No, I don’t think so.’

What’s it like? ‘Psychological novel, more Updike than Roth, more
Remains of the Day
than Updike.’ Ah.

‘I like that painting,’ he says, gesturing at the large contemporary canvas opposite, depicting a woman holding a lily beside a man sleeping in bed. Does he buy art?

‘No, not really.’

Holidays?

‘I want to take more.’ He and his wife are aiming for four children – meticulous again – but could squeeze in some trips if the grandparents step in to help.

Anyway, time to go, questions to face downstairs on profit and Wall Street and dotcom survival. Looking back, does he think he has been smart or just lucky?

‘Yeah, you go from running a business in your garage to building a multinational, there’s a tremendous amount of luck involved, and good timing.’

Smart luck? ‘Well,’ he says, his little-boy grin widening further, ‘I am quite happy with just dumb luck, yunno? Hahaha!’

16 FEBRUARY 2002

The Russian politician-turned-businessman ran the Kremlin for Boris Yeltsin, brought privatization to Russia and enraged a nation

By Robert Cottrell

The love affair between Muscovites and Japanese food is a mystery to me, but a welcome one. Izumi has some of the best, which is one reason I am pleased Anatoly Chubais has chosen it as the venue for our lunch.

My second reason for being pleased is that it gives me a chance to revisit old haunts. Izumi occupies a big 19th-century house on Spiridonovka, a quietly prosperous street where I rented a long, thin, gloomy flat when I first moved to Moscow in 1995.

Soon afterwards I discovered the previous occupant had plunged to his death from what was now my fifth-floor balcony, while caught in the midst of a diamond-smuggling scandal. I moved out a few weeks later.

Frankly, if Chubais had proposed a hotdog at the railway station, I would have agreed as readily. Here is a person who privatized Russia, ran the Kremlin for Boris Yeltsin and is commonly ranked among the dozen most influential men in the country.

We are due to meet at 2pm, early for lunch in Moscow on a Saturday. But my guest has another appointment at 4pm, he explains – with the prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov. And if that sounds like name-dropping, it can be bettered. We were going to have lunch the previous Saturday, but Chubais cancelled at the last minute. President Vladimir Putin had summoned him.

We have taken a private room at the suggestion of Chubais’s office, and it proves to be a happy fudge of style and comfort. There are scrolls
and tatamis and a low Japanese table but beneath the table is a pit. We can sit on the edge of it and dangle our legs happily beneath, instead of scrunching them up and pretending to be comfortable.

The first thing that strikes me is that he is on time – a pleasing gesture in a city where time gets treated more cavalierly the higher up the social scale you go. The second thing I notice is that he has lost a bit of weight since I last saw him a year ago, a process in which Japanese food has doubtless played its part.

The third thing I notice, when the picture menu does its rounds, is his courtesy to the waitress, a Russian girl wrapped up in a Japanese gown. His talent for enraging the public at large is matched by his talent for charming them as individuals.

I stab my finger at a photograph showing a generous-looking plank of mixed sushi and I deduce that Chubais has done something similar. The assortments that arrive after 10 minutes look much the same.

He orders green tea and I follow his example. I could have wished for something stronger but the prospect of Kasyanov hangs over our meal.

We begin to talk. Ten years have passed since his privatization programme, a fire-sale of state factories, forced capitalism of a harsh and wild kind on Russia. It made a few people very rich and left a lot of people very poor. Most Russians hated him for it.

I ask him what he thinks now of the results. ‘What we finally have,’ he replies, ‘is what we were thinking about then … But it took much more effort, it brought much more pain, it cost far more than we had hoped.’

But the main point, he continues, is that it was done at all. Because of it, Russia will have private property for generations to come. ‘And I did it,’ he says. ‘With all the mistakes. Despite all the criticism. I did it.’

He has no regrets, either, about getting Boris Yeltsin re-elected president in 1996. He took over the campaign when Yeltsin had a popularity rating in the low single figures and was so ill with heart problems he could barely speak a coherent sentence. A clique of tycoons bankrolled the election, then rewarded themselves with state assets worth billions of dollars for which they paid very little. Russians blamed Chubais for that also.

‘If I found myself in the same situation,’ he says, ‘I would make absolutely the same decision.’ It was ‘a fundamental historical choice’. The
asset-stripping that followed was ‘the price we paid for not allowing the Communists back into the country’.

By this time we are well into our sushi, which is good but not spectacular. The usual question about sushi in Moscow is not ‘Is it fresh?’ but ‘Has it been thawed properly?’ I reckon this is fresh.

Talking of ‘fundamental historical choices’, I ask Chubais about the most dramatic of them all: the decision taken by Yeltsin to use tanks against the Russian parliament in 1993 when it challenged and blocked his authority.

The event still divides Russians. At this point I see the merit of our private room. His reply would start a fight in half the bars of Moscow.

‘If the country had not paid this small blood in 1993,’ he says, ‘it would have paid huge blood in the next two or five or ten years. The decision for Yeltsin, personally, was fantastically difficult. And that is why finally he lost his political momentum. He had to live with the results of it. Only one person, Yeltsin, could know the real price of his decision when you say to the defence ministry, “Shoot! With tanks!” ’

He admires Putin, whom he thinks is making courageous long-term decisions in economic and foreign policy. But he also surprises me with his reply when I say that some in the west think Russia is turning into a police state.

‘The fear is not only in the west, it is here, too,’ he says. ‘We can’t just push it aside and say it is stupid. No, it is serious. There are political forces not far from Putin who would support exactly that style of development for Russia. But there are political forces strongly opposing it, including the Union of Right Forces [a centre-right party of which Chubais is a leader]. We should not just discuss if it will happen or not. We should fight against it.’

The time is coming for Chubais to leave. These days he runs UES, Russia’s national power company, and I imagine Kasyanov wants to talk to him about the price of electricity. He decides against dessert and seems faintly irritated when a plate of creamy sticky things arrives, compliments of the house. I see him off, pay the bill and wander out on to Spiridonovka.

It looks little changed but then it always was a posh street. More of Moscow, and of Russia, is catching up with it. The privatized economy
is beginning to work. In a sense, Russia is coming round to Chubais’s way of thinking.

And he is still only 46. For all his protestations to be happy in business, I would eat my chopsticks if he did not have his eye on the Russian presidential election of 2008, when Putin’s second term is over. And at Izumi, the chopsticks are made of stainless steel.

25 JANUARY 2008

Did President Sarkozy offer him the finance ministry? Just because he isn’t saying doesn’t mean the Axa CEO is risk-averse: he is a freefall parachutist, after all

By Adam Jones

France can often resemble a loose federation of two very different nations. One is inhabited by state employees hostile to the free market and globalization. The second houses dynamic, multinational companies of world renown. Each is exasperated by the other’s antics.

If the giant businesses that make up France’s CAC 40 stock-market index were ever to give up on this fragile union and secede, Henri de Castries would be a strong candidate to be their first head of state. The boyish 53-year-old is one of France’s most respected managers, having already notched up nearly eight years as chief executive of Axa, the acquisitive Paris-based group that is among the world’s biggest insurers. His stature is such that last year there had been talk that he had been offered – and had turned down – the job of French finance minister.

We meet on one of those days when secession seems like a good idea. France’s transport network is paralysed by the first day of a strike against public-sector pension reforms proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Luckily, de Castries has chosen Laurent, a restaurant within walking distance of both Axa’s HQ and the
FT
’s offices.