The Everything War
Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
**LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024**
‘Riveting and explosive. This is the business story of our time.’
Christopher Leonard, New York Times Bestselling Author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money
'A hard-hitting analysis of Amazon’s dominance. Makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful.'
Financial Times
---
From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating exposé of Amazon's endless strategic greed, its pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary, and the growing efforts to stop it.
For over twenty years, Amazon was the quintessential American success story, whilst its “customer obsession” approach made it indelibly attractive to consumers across the globe. But the company was not benevolent; it operated in ways that ensured it stayed on top, coming to dominate over a dozen industries beyond retail, growing voraciously by abusing data, exploiting partners, copying competitors, and avoiding taxes—leveraging its power to extract whatever it could, at any cost and without much scrutiny. Until now.
With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people – from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive – Dana Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy.
In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission filed a monopoly lawsuit against Amazon in what may become one of the largest antitrust cases in the 21st century. As Amazon’s supremacy is finally challenged, The Everything War is the definitive, inside story of how it grew into one of the most powerful and feared companies in the world – and why this is the most consequential business story of our times.
Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award 2024, announced August 2024.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal reporter Mattioli debuts with a blistering exposé of how Amazon used its "size, leverage, and access to data across industries to choke competition." According to Mattioli, Amazon's enormous growth since the late 1990s was fueled by a business model that dominated industries by introducing low prices (even when it meant operating at a loss) to lure customers away from competitors, who rarely had the resources to outlast Amazon's steep discounts. Once rivals had been bankrupted or bought out, Amazon would raise prices again. Mattioli's impressive reporting—which draws on internal documents and hundreds of interviews with employees, senior executives, and government officials—recreates the company's conquests in disturbing detail. For instance, Mattioli recounts how Amazon lost $200 million in one month selling discounted diapers to force Quidsi, parent company of Diapers.com, to the bargaining table, and threatened to give diapers away if the company didn't capitulate to Amazon's takeover bid (Amazon acquired Quidsi in 2010). Mattioli also delves into Federal Trade Commission chairperson Lina Khan's lawsuit against Amazon for "maintaining an illegal monopoly," presenting Khan as a heroic underdog for suing over the objections of her risk-averse colleagues at the FTC. Mattioli spins the legal wrangling into surprisingly riveting reading, and the meticulous accounts of Amazon's nefarious practices outrage. This is investigative journalism at its finest.
