Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Please welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin and his guest, the President and CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy.

Andy Jassy is here. He's the CEO of Amazon. He's now been in the job about 1.5 years, I want to say.

A little less.

A little less, thrown into the deep end. And this is one of America's largest businesses, has a huge impact on so many parts of our economy and our world, and I want to talk to you about all of it. I think we're all trying to make sense of what's going on, and you have a unique lens onto it.

This is your first time at DealBook, and I thought maybe we'd go back a little bit because I know that you never really expected, wanted or imagined that you would take over from Jeff Bezos and become the CEO of Amazon. So I thought before we can get into it, tell us the story. What happened?

Well, first, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yes, I've been in Amazon for 25 years. Prior to doing this job, I started and was part of the team that manage AWS since its inception. And I love that job, and I wasn't really looking to do something different. And I also didn't really think that Jeff was ever going to do something different at the time that I worked there. And so I just wasn't thinking about it. And he wrote me a note and said that he wanted to talk to me on the phone, which is somewhat unusual. Normally, he just writes me with what he wants. And so we got on the phone and he said that he had been thinking about it for a while, and he was thinking about doing something different, but would only do it if I was willing to take on the CEO role. And I was surprised, and I spent most of the first part of that conversation really asking if he was sure, if he wanted to make a change. And he had clearly been thinking about it. And I was very flattered. I asked him if I could talk about it with my wife. All decisions I've made...

You weren't going to say yes immediately?

I have learned the hard way in my life that when I have not made key decisions with my wife, and I've made them myself, they have not worked out well, including where we chose to live in Seattle when we first moved. We drove all the way across the country. I picked out this place myself when I was working there for a couple of months before we both moved. When we got in the apartment, my wife looked around and started to weep. And so I learned that it's important to make those decisions together. And we actually went to dinner that night. It was right in the middle of pandemic. And it was pouring in Seattle, and it just happened to be our date night, and we went to this place we've never been to before or never have been since where they had these little huts for each table. And we sat in there and it was pouring rain, and we were the last ones to leave. They finally said you need to leave. But we had a long conversation about it, and she was very supportive as she always is. And I said yes, and I'm flattered and I'm aware what a big responsibility it is.

Okay. So here we are, almost 1.5 years later, is this anything of what you expected was going to happen? You got this job in the middle of pandemic. The company was in super growth mode and trying to build out to deal with all of the consumers out there, the stock was through the roof, and here we are.

Yes. A lot has happened in the last few years that I'm not sure people anticipated. If you just look in 2020, our retail business grew 39% year-over-year at a $245 billion annual run rate, which is unprecedented. And it forced us to make decisions in that time to spend a lot more money and to go much faster in building infrastructure than we ever imagined we would. We've built a physical fulfillment center footprint over 25 years that we doubled in 24 months. And we made that decision even though we knew we might be overbuilding because it took 2 years to build fulfillment centers at that time. It was hard for us to imagine what '21 was going to be, let alone '22, but we decided that we were going to shade on the side of consumers and sellers who didn't want to be constrained. And so that was a big decision that we made. And then this time last year, it looked like we were coming out of the pandemic, and then Omicron happened, and the war in Ukraine happened, and the inflationary environment that we're in happened and now a very uncertain economy. I mean there are issues that not just Amazon is dealing with, most companies are dealing with a number of these issues in some sort. And so just looking at how consumers are adapting to the environment is one of the things we're trying to figure out. When we see consumers right now being very thoughtful about how they spend, trying to stretch their dollars, they're looking for deals, they love stocking stuffers.

Have you seen a shift, I mean this last Thanksgiving Friday?

Yes. I mean it's very clear that consumers, they're spending, but they're being careful about trying to stretch their dollars. We spent a lot of time having millions of deals available for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the Turkey Five, people call it. People care a lot about getting a bargain right now. And they were attracted to stocking stuffers in an even more pervasive way than normal. In discretionary categories like computers or electronics or TVs, you see people trading down in models just to try to get more for their money. And so it's why we spend so much time with our third-party sellers and selling partners having a really broad array of selection, and we did a bunch of advanced inventory buying to make sure we were in stock on things. And we worked really hard on having great deals. You have to make sure that you do a great job getting items to people reliably and quickly. In difficult and uncertain economies, we've found over time that consumers are very careful about who they choose to partner with. They go with people and companies that are going to take care of them and that are going to provide a great customer experience. And that has always been something that we have focused very squarely up.

You recently announced layoffs at the company. That is a first in a very, very long time. And it's still in process. So what does that look like to you? And also, when do you think you realized that this was going to be needed? Because I was going back and watching some old interviews of you, even back in September, and I think you thought, at that point, maybe it would be no increase in hiring but probably not going in reverse.

Yes. This is the time of the year we do our operating planning, and we've been doing it over the last 4 months or so. And I've probably gone through, along with the senior team, 50 or 60 of these operating plans.

Are these the famous 6-pagers?

They are all 6 pages in the body and then an appendix.

How long is the appendix allowed to be?

There is no limit to the appendix, and people take advantage of that lack of a limit. But they're very thoughtful. It's a much better way to go through information, in my opinion, than through PowerPoint where you just don't get into the detail. In any event, we've been going through it, and it's the time of the year where our leaders look at where they want to spend resources and where they should adjust. And this year, we had the lens of a very uncertain economic environment as well as our having hired very aggressively over the last several years. And I think as we went through our plans, you just started seeing, over the months, pretty similar trends where the economy was more uncertain. We are seeing things that were different from what we've seen before. And we just felt like we needed to streamline our costs. And our goal really in how we've gone through the operating plan has been to very thoughtfully but thoroughly go through the plans and make sure that where we can, we streamline or cut costs, but at the same time, we don't compromise on the key strategic long-term bets that we think can change the company. And that's how we've tried to view these operating plans. Just as we've gone through them, as I said, you started to see some trends, and we started to realize that when you look at different sensitivities, some of our cost structure was out in front of where we thought we wanted to be. And we made that incredibly difficult decision. At first, you're right, one of the things we did was to pause incremental hiring. But as we went through the plans, we realized we needed to be more slim on some of our resources.

If you could go back and do the big expansion during the pandemic again, what do you think?

It's a really interesting question, and it cuts across a few different dimensions. I mean there's the actual infrastructure build-out and then there's people expansion. I think on the infrastructure build-out, given what we knew at that time, given how long fulfillment centers were taking, given that we're going to always shade on the side of customers, I would have done it again. I think it was the right decision. I think the team made the right decision. We knew when we were making it that we might be overbuilding, but we knew we would grow into it, and that's happening. And I think we're going to always err on the side of customers. I think on the people side, when businesses are doing well, and we had a number of businesses that were growing really quickly, one of the reasons that we are growing quickly was that we are doubling down on the things that were working. And knowing some of the unusual circumstances that have arisen over the last 1.5 years were hard to know, so I don't necessarily think it was the wrong thing to do, doubling down, because we are growing so well. And we have so many ideas that we thought were good for customers and good for the business. But I think it's a good lesson, I think, for everybody when you're hiring, even when things are going really well, that it's good to think about if there's some kind of sudden change, even one that you just have a little bit of a hard time imagining, would you like the incremental head count that you're adding at that time or do you want to be a little bit more conservative.

I want to talk about people in a moment because there's a question we should talk about, labor. But I want to ask you about one of the units because it's a unit that I think a lot of us know and maybe have in our home, which is devices, these Alexas, Echo, all over, also Kindle famously. And that's one of the businesses where some of these reductions are happening. And some of the reports over the year suggest that at certain times, this was a group that was losing as much as $5 billion back in 2018. I don't know what it was losing this year that led you there. But sort of the whole dream of Alexa and Echo, I thought, was that everybody would have these in their homes, and therefore, they would then buy lots of stuff on them. Has that not been realized?

Well, you have to be careful what you believe in what you read. You probably know this well.

We're a newspaper, yes.

And I think there was some misreporting that was going on in the last few weeks. But actually, I'm really pleased and optimistic with our devices business. Of course, devices, there's a lot of individual devices that are part of our Devices division. In the case of Alexa, we have a couple of hundred million end points that customers are using. It has very significant traction, and it's also driving a lot of e-commerce shopping that sometimes it's hard to capture. You have to look at both the direct commerce that it's driving, and of course, you can account for that in lots of different places. But then also, there are a lot of actions people take that lead them to buy, putting things in a shopping list, things like that. So Alexa, it's got a lot of traction and end points. It's driving a lot of e-commerce. If we were trying to build the best smart speaker, that will be a different investment than what we're trying to do, which is to build the world's best personal AI or assistant. That's a much more expansive investment, and we really believe in that vision. And we like the traction where we are, but it's not a couple of year vision. It's a multiyear vision. There's a lot of the big bets that we make. If you look at the other devices, if you look at Fire TV, we've never had more people using Fire TV. It's the way that a lot of people access and manage their streaming video content. Or you look at Ring or Blink, which are in the camera and doorbell, in the security space, we're category leaders and have grown incredibly quickly and going to be very big profitable businesses for us. You mentioned the Kindle reader, our tablets drive a lot of downstream purchases of books and other items. So I like a lot of the things that we're doing in devices. I like the results in a lot of them. I'm optimistic about them long term. There were some areas where some of the experience we were pursuing in the devices space, they had some traction, but we didn't see them being really big needle movers. And in those cases, we either wound those down or slowed those down to streamline a little bit as part of that cost exercise.

Let's talk about the people of it, though, and this labor issue because it's something that's a challenge you've been confronting, a lot of other companies in America have been dealing with. The labor movement, it's happening at your firm as well. Last month, workers at a warehouse in Albany voted no on a union. Here in Staten Island, they voted yes. And there's a bit of a battle going on there. But what do you see as the state of this dynamic right now?

Well, in the U.S., there's been only one of our facilities that has voted for a union. It's the Staten Island one you mentioned. There are a lot of irregularities in that vote, which is why there are objections and it's working its way through the legal process. The last two, a sortation center in Staten Island and the Albany facility you mentioned, have voted against the union. And this is also interesting, it's one of many topics in this country that are very hard to discuss and debate. In fact, you probably saw that the NLRB is suing Amazon over comments I made in our last interview in April.

Yes.

Be careful about what I'd say, I guess, but where I stated that we didn't favor unions because they were more bureaucratic and limited agility, which I thought was fairly noncontroversial and straightforward. But I guess you're not allowed to say that or some people think you're not allowed to say that. But the truth is that employees get to choose. They always have the choice. And it's not up to us. It's up to them. And what we tell our employees in our fulfillment centers is that we think they're better off without a union for a few reasons. One is we try to hire people who we empower if they find ways that they can make the experience better for customers or their fellow teammates. They can just go fix it. They don't have to go through a union. It's not bureaucratic. It's not slow. They can just go ad fix that. And we think that's pretty empowering and a great way to work. And I think it's nice to be able to have a direct relationship with your manager. We like to hear from all our employees as opposed to having it filtered through one or 2 voices. And I also think when you have unions, you often end up with this us versus them mentality that's not as productive when you're trying to advance and trying to accomplish on the scale we are. And so I think if you want to operate in the same structure we have without unions, you have to have compelling benefits. And it's why we were in the $15 minimum wage a few years ago, it's now up to $19 an hour starting hourly salary, full health insurance, 401(k) and up to 20 weeks of parental leave. And we also have this career choice program where our employees in the fulfillment center, if they want to get an advanced education or go to college, we'll pay for it. And so I think that set of benefits, they've accomplished that without a union, they're compelling. And I think it's part of why they keep voting no.

But let me ask you about this push-pull. A federal judge last week filed what some people described as a sweeping national "cease and desist" order against Amazon for interfering with the rights of workers forming unions. And it's expected that the NLRB will soon certify this labor union's right to represent at JFK8. Is that decision going to change, you think, the way Amazon has interacted with its workers in these union issues?

Well, my own opinion, where we are with that legal process, is that we're far from over with it. I think that it's going to work its way through the NLRB. It's probably unlikely the NLRB is going to rule against itself. And that has a real chance to end up in federal courts. And so I think that process will take time. But it's not going to change how we interact with our employees. We're passionate about trying to have our jobs in our fulfillment centers be great jobs that people can continue to grow at. If you look at how many people, just in our fulfillment centers, about 25,000, 30,000 have been promoted in the last year or 2. They're safe jobs. They're solid paying jobs with great benefits. And we're all part of trying to help customers' lives be better every day.

Is there any company you think out there that works with a union that does it well?

I don't know. What do you think?

Touché. Let me ask you about something else that's in the headlines. And it's a controversial topic, as you very well know. Kyrie Irving on social media pushed out this Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America film and book. This is a film end book that is sold on Amazon. And as you know, he was suspended from the NBA and you've gotten letters from Mila Kunis and Debra Messing and all sorts of people in Hollywood. The ADL has come out and asked you to take this book off the site. What's your view?

Well, trying to decide which content contains hate content, to an extent, enough that we don't provide access to customers is one of the trickiest issues that we deal with in the company. And in some cases, it's more straightforward. When you have content that actively incites or promotes violence or teaches people how to do things like pedophilia, those are easy. We don't allow those and those are straightforward decisions. When you have content whose primary purpose is not to espouse hate or ascribe negative characteristics to people, that is much trickier and a very slippery scope if we take a lot of those out of the store. And we have hundreds of millions of customers with lots of different viewpoints. And inside the company, we won't tolerate or discrimination or harassment but we also recognize, as a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with lots of different viewpoints, that we have to be willing to allow access to those viewpoints even if they are objectionable and even if they differ from our own personal viewpoints, if you're going to serve that number of people.

So what's your point? So I'm Jewish, I don't like it. I'll be honest. I don't like it. I'm worried about antisemitism. I'm worried about what we're seeing across the country, across the globe. I think it may not incite violence in the moment but could lead to it eventually.

Look, I'm Jewish too, and I'm worried about antisemitism, and I find several parts to that content very objectionable. But I think that you have to have principles if you're going to manage something as large as we do with hundreds of millions of customers. And again, to me, you have to be willing to allow viewpoints that are different from your own if the primary purpose of the content is not hatred.

You guys had said that you might put a notice on some content, including this. Are you still planning to do that?

Well, we've been looking at it. Again, these are, as I've mentioned earlier, tricky issues. We have a pretty significant group of people, a panel, that looks at each piece of content when there's an angle where we have to explore whether we should remove it. And it's a pretty involved process, and it's hard to scale. And then if on top of it, you decide that you're going to build another process where you have to evaluate which items get disclaimers or not, it's just very hard to scale. And there are a lot of books and a lot of pieces of content that have mentions or parts of that content where people would want those disclaimers. And we don't want to have a store where every page has a disclaimer. And the reality too is that we have very expansive customer reviews. And for the books that have a lot of attention and have a lot of public attention like this, customers do a pretty good job of warning people when there's objectionable content.

What do you think of him getting suspended?

What's that?

What do you think about him getting suspended?

Who's getting suspended?

Kyrie Irving.

Well, my understanding is that was a Nets decision more than an NBA decision. And I don't know all the details around why they ultimately decided to do it. But it's a decision I'm sure Joe Tsai and the team thought carefully about.

Let's talk about media. We just spent some time with Ben Affleck. He's got a big picture coming out on your service this spring.

Sure.

You've invested deeply in the film side of this, also Thursday Night Football is now it. What do you see that component parts of Amazon becoming? I think when it first started, people thought it was a way to avoid churn for Prime or something else, but what's it becoming? Or where do you want it to be?

Well, we're incredibly excited about what we're doing in the streaming content space. And just the success of Lord of the Rings and the success of Thursday Night Football -- and just Thursday Night Football, if you look at it, it has 5 million, 6 million viewers, has been more than double that. It's got 20% higher viewership in the 18 to 34 demographic, which is really important to a lot of different constituents, which is about 20% higher than before and larger than the NFL window for it. And so we're really excited about it. There are a number of parts to what we're trying to do with streaming media. The reality is that our private video offering and all of that content is a really important ingredient in when people choose to sign up for Prime or not. It's always been something that's driven Prime subscriptions. But increasingly, you see more and more people who are signing up to Prime because of the video content. So that's very attractive. And then when people sign up to Prime, even if they sign up from the video content, they tend to spend money with us in our stores and our e-commerce offerings. And so I do think, over time, we have opportunities to make our Prime video business a stand-alone business that has very attractive economics. We have a lot of video on demand. We have a channels program where a very large number of third-party media providers will ingest their content into our technology.

Is that where you ultimately want to be? Do you want to be the center of this?

I think what we want to do is provide the world's best selection of streaming content for customers.

But it's not supposed to be Netflix or Disney or something else or a Hulu+?

Customers would like to go to a place and find everything they want. Nobody wants to have to go to 6, 7 different places. And it's part of what's attractive to our Prime customers, being able to find all that selection. And for our third-party media partners and channels, they get the benefit of all the investment we've made in deep learning and machine learning on the technology part and the viewing experience, but they also get access to our couple of hundred million plus Prime subscribers to sign up subscribers. And that's been very attractive for them. And for our customers, being able to find it all in one place is very compelling.

How big is sports rights long term?

I think sports, as you know, we've been doing a lot more there, Thursday Night Football and UEFA and Champions League. And I think you'll continue to see us investing in sports. I mean, sports is such a unique asset. If you look every year at the most watched programs, sports often occupies 75% of those spots. And they drive live engagement and they drive Prime subscription. So I think you'll expect to see sports.

You think Jeff Bezos is going to buy the Commanders?

You should ask Jeff that question.

Have you talked to him about it?

Jeff doesn't really consult with me on his investments.

Though, he will have to get a waiver from the other NFL owners. Do you know about this?

Is that true?

Well, no. There's a question because of his role at Amazon, whether he would need to get a waiver from the other owners because there could be a potential conflict.

Yes. I don't know. I don't know the details of that, but I'm confident that if he chose to do something in that space, he would obviously follow whatever the rules are.

Do you talk to him a lot? How often do you talk to him?

I do talk to Jeff a lot. I talk to him probably about once a week or so. And I've had a long close relationship with Jeff for 22 years or so, 23 years. And I worked directly for him for about 20 before I did this job. And I really appreciate having the opportunity to ask for his counsel and bounce things off of him. It's very useful.

Well, he, by the way, I don't think is going to be pulling an Iger. He looks like he's living his best life and you're probably in a good position. Two other things, given the challenges in the space right now, what about the moonshots? You have a lot of money riding on things like Project Kuiper. And that's a satellite service that would rival, for example, what Elon Musk is doing with Starlink. Do you think you'll continue to invest in those things? How does that shift?

Well, I think it's a good question and especially right now. And I think that a lot of companies have different strategies for how they think about investments, and there is no one right way to do it. But the way we think about strategic investments are we ask ourselves 4 questions: we ask, if we're successful, can it be big and move the needle at Amazon and have the right ROICs; is it being well served today; do we have a differentiated approach; and do we have some competence in that area and, if not, can we acquire it quickly. And if we like the answers to those questions, then we'll invest. Sometimes, that process leads to investments that are more predictable. I came with a company where we were books only. When we invested in music and video and electronics, toys and home improvement, it didn't at the time seem obvious, but in retrospect I think it was obvious. And I think us investing in emerging geographies as we are now, it's one of our big investments in India, in Brazil and Turkey and Mexico, seems pretty straightforward; or our business-to-business offering, which is Amazon business, which is a huge investment area for us, which is already over $25 billion in gross merchandise sales, fairly obvious. Our grocery space, I think people understand that we're going to live in a world of omnichannel. I think those are kind of more predictable for people. But sometimes that process I mentioned yields investments that aren't as obvious. And I had a front row seat to the AWS experience where I led it since its inception and worked with the team to grow and build it, and I watched the skepticism externally and internally about what we were doing there. And just think about how different Amazon would be and our future would be if we didn't have AWS. And so sometimes we will invest in things that are pretty different if we like the answers to those questions. And I think if you go to Kuiper, as an example, which is our low Earth orbit satellite that we're building, there's 400 million people in this world who don't have connectivity to the Internet, into technology and access to information. And there's loads of governments that are going to need it too for intelligence and mapping and navigational pieces. And so we actually believe it has a lot of characteristics like AWS. It's very capital intensive. But there are I think there's a handful of companies that have the technical inventive aptitude and will and I'll say the investment hypothesis to go after that. And so when I look at things like Kuiper or Zoox, which is our autonomous driving, ride-hailing service, or even Alexa, I have a lot of optimism about those bets. Do I think every single one of them is going to be successful? The history of business, the history of Amazon, suggests no. It's rare for every one of your big bets. But if even one of them actually becomes that fourth pillar on top of Marketplace and Prime and AWS, we're a different company. And I think this time, this next year or 2 with the economy, is going to test the long-term resolve of a lot of companies. There are going to be a lot of companies who decide that they're going to basically stop doing anything that's not their core revenue-generating businesses. And by the way, it's a reasonable approach. But we're trying to build a business long term that will last all of us. And so what we're trying to do is streamline our costs in a bunch of different areas while, at the same time, making sure that we keep betting on the things that we believe long term could change lives.

Where does health care fit into all this? Because there have been a lot of experiments that have started and, in some cases, stopped. You're now making a new one. What have you learned? And what's the real prospect here?

Well, I think part of what we've learned, and probably it's not a surprise to anybody in this room, which is the primary health care experience in this country is very bad and it's in dire need of being reinvented. And it's complicated, and it's hard. And it's part of why I think a lot of people recognize it, and it hasn't happened yet. But I think that for a long time, our customers wanted us to have pharmacy offerings, and we've built something there. We're still in the relative early days and continuing to add all kinds of functionality. But we like the start we're off to there. Amazon Care started as an experiment really just for our own company about can we provide a better primary care experience, and people loved the customer experience so much. I constantly kept checking because it started in the group that was part of my organization in my last job, and I just couldn't believe the customer satisfaction scores. I kept asking if there were mistakes. But people so badly want a different experience. I think in the same way that we've rolled our eyes and our parents said there were no color TVs and our kids roll their eyes when we say that we didn't have the Internet or mobile phones, I think 10 years from now, people are going to not believe that the way you got primary care was that you made an appointment a month in advance, had to drive to the doctor's office, park, wait and reception for 20 minutes, waiting...

So you think 10 years.

I do. And I think that what Care taught us, I don't think we had the right business model in what we're pursuing in Care, which is why we decided to shut it down. But what Care taught us was that people badly want a different model. And we came across One Medical, which has an unbelievable digital app so that whether you're doing simply chats or video chats, you can get a lot of your examination stuff done there. But if you need to come in, they have clinics in lots of different cities and they don't rush doctors through for 5 minutes, they're either 30- or 60-minute appointments, depending on what the customers want. If you look at their customer satisfaction scores and the NPS scores and the retention, they're so high people are hungry for a different experience. And so I think we have the ability, and we're hoping to be part of making that health care experience much better in this country.

We're running out of time, I know, but do you think, given the size and scale of Amazon, and I know we can define end markets in different ways, that right now, if you wanted to make a big acquisition, that you could, in this landscape, this political landscape.

Well, it always depends on what you're talking about acquiring. I mean, obviously, we have done 2 acquisitions relatively recently. They are meaningful acquisitions. We thought hard about them. We love those teams. We build those customer experiences. We think they'll be great together. And we're optimistic that those will close. There are certain acquisitions that are super close to the main part of kind of core businesses that may be harder to do than in the past in this environment. But I do believe you can do acquisitions in this period. It will be interesting to see. I mean, if you look at some of the really big ones where for us, with One Medical where we're not really in health care in a pervasive way, that's different from some of these acquisitions like Microsoft and Activision, which is a core part of their video business. It'd be interesting to see what happens in the gaming space or some of the supermarket and grocery...

And do you think that those deals should go through? Like, you look at Microsoft and Activision and say that's good for competition? Do you think that's best? I mean this goes to the idea of big companies that have lots of financial power than buying adjacent businesses that they might not actually be in right now, but they're able to therefore, subsidize to some degree from the other business, which I think is, in large part, been the success, frankly, of a lot of the business model at Amazon. You've been able to sort of use certain businesses to then subsidize other businesses as they've grown.

Yes. I see a little bit differently which is, in our business, we have a number of consumer offerings that are all driving value for customers in the form of Prime. And so they're kind of part of that same consumer business that we've got. And of course, AWS was totally different with a different customer base and a different customer experience. You have to build something that people want to use and that really solves meaningful problems, which the cloud, in which AWS innovated and kind of pioneered, makes it much less expensive and much faster to invent. But I think you got to look at them one by one. And I think when you have a company that has very large share, acquiring another company that has very large share in the same precise space, I think those are ones that are going to look at it more carefully than others. You just have to not go overboard because you can kind of make it difficult for companies to build the right scalable experiences for customers.

We got to wrap up, but let me just ask you this. Since you didn't expect you're going to get this job, how long do you want to do this? And if you weren't doing this, what would you actually want to do?

Well, I love my job, and I love Amazon. And I think one of the reasons why when I went and thought about whether I was going to accept the job that I decided to do it, even though I love my other job and I felt a lot of passion about starting it from scratch with a group of people, is that I love the company and we're trying to build a business and a set of customer experiences that will last all of us. So I hope to do it for a while. It's hard for me imagine what else I'd be doing because I've been doing it for 25 years. I came at Amazon straight out of graduate school. While I was in graduate school, I was helping manage a band, and I had this idea about a music management/label idea. Maybe I would try playing music. I used to always tell people, in my 20s, that I wanted to be the commissioner of one of the major leagues, maybe I'd do something in sports. I've always been interested in writing a screenplay, which probably surprises you, so maybe I would write. Or maybe I would just start another business, I don't know. But I'm not thinking about those things very hard because I love what I'm doing, and we've got a lot of work to do.

The musician, the screenwriter and maybe the commissioner. You could approve that deal for Jeff. Andy Jassy, thank you so very, very much.

Thanks, Andy.

Thank you. Appreciate it.