Jeff Bezos has seen the future of work, and it doesn’t involve jobs for human beings

I once spoke after Jeff Bezos at conference. Similar to the kid who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense, Jeff Bezos sees the future of business better than most CEOs. When asked about job destruction and what it would mean for our society, he suggested one more time that we should consider adopting a universal minimum income. Or, he added, a negative income tax where every citizen is granted a cash payment that will be sufficient to stay above the poverty line. People fawned, “What a great man, so concerned about the little guy.”

But wait. Ever notice that there are very few pictures of the inside of an Amazon warehouse?

Why is that? Because the inside of an Amazon warehouse is upsetting, even disturbing. Unsafe working conditions? Nope. Abuse of employees as per the New York Times article? No. What’s disturbing is the absence of abuse, or more specifically, the absence of people. The reason Jeff Bezos is advocating a guaranteed income for Americans is he has seen the future of work and, at least in his vision, it doesn’t involve jobs for human beings. At least not enough of them to sustain the current workforce. Increasingly, robots will perform many of the functions of human employees, almost as well (and sometimes a lot better), without annoying requests to leave early to pick up their kid from karate.

Amazon doesn’t talk publicly about robotics, one of its core competencies, as it realizes it would soon be fodder for late-night hosts and blustery political candidates. In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired Kiva Systems, a sophisticated warehouse robotics firm, for $775 million. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi feels a dramatic disturbance in the force when the Imperial Army turns the Death Star on Alderaan and destroys the planet. When the acquisition of Kiva closed, every union member should have felt a similar disturbance. Entrepreneurs create jobs, right? No, they don’t. Most entrepreneurs, at least in tech, leverage processing power and bandwidth to destroy jobs by offering more for less.

Amazon grew its revenues $28 billion in 2016 in a retail environment where growth is essentially flat. If you take the number of people Amazon needs to do one million dollars in revenue vs. the number of people Macy’s would need, as Macy’s is a decent proxy for retail productivity across the sector (it is, in fact, more productive than most retailers), then it’s reasonable to say that Amazon’s growth will result in the destruction of 76,000 retail jobs this year. Imagine filling up the largest stadium in the NFL (Cowboy Stadium) with merchandisers, cashiers, sales associates, e-commerce managers, security guards and letting them know that, courtesy of Amazon, their services are no longer needed. Then, be sure to reserve Cowboy Stadium and Madison Square Garden next year, as it’s only going to get worse (or better, if you are Amazon shareholders).

Amazon isn’t unique among the Four (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple) in this regard: all do more with less, and all put people out of work.

My first reaction to Bezos’s speech was: how refreshing to hear a CEO who didn’t quote Ayn Rand. However, as I thought further, I realized that Bezos’s words were terrifying. Or just resigned. The guy who has the greatest insight and influence into the future of the world’s largest business (consumer retail) has come to the conclusion that there’s no way the economy will be able to create, as it has done in the past, enough jobs to replace those being destroyed. Perhaps our society has just given up and doesn’t want the burden of trying to figure out how to sustain a middle class.

Ponder that and ask, “Will my kids have a better life than me?”

World Domination

Amazon’s path to a trillion likely involves a combination of extension into other parts of the retail value chain and further acquisition. Amazon recently announced it was leasing twenty Boeing 757s, purchasing tractor trailers, and getting into shipping. The doubling of the company’s stock in the last eighteen months and the halving of the value of many competing retail stocks (including Macy’s and Carrefour) make acquisition an appealing way to add scale and force relationships with brands that have refused to work with them (any luxury brand). The Whole Foods acquisition allows it to establish a foothold in grocery and acquire a few hundred intelligent warehouses currently posing as stores.

Amazon’s $434 billion market cap means the Seattle firm could pay (as of April 2016) a 50 percent premium to acquire the outstanding shares of Macy’s ($8 billion market cap) and Carrefour ($16 billion) and still only incur an 8 percent dilution to its own shareholders. One can only guess what the U.S. Justice Department would say, but my guess is that it would be happy to make the American economy even more competitive. And the shareholders of Macy’s and Carrefour would probably breathe a sigh of relief.

Or, better yet, Amazon could perfect the cashless checkout technology they’re working on with Amazon Go, get the media world hot and bothered, and increase the value of the firm by $10 billion. That would be enough to make this, or several other crazy ideas, a reality by throwing cash at it courtesy of the markets, which reward Amazon and punish the rest of retail, as they gaze adoringly at the best storyteller of our age, sans maybe Steven Spielberg—Jeff Bezos. To be fair, Bezos is delivering on his vision to dominate global retail—and then to own the infrastructure that most consumer businesses will pay a toll to access. European retail growth in 2017 will be 1.6 percent. In 2018, it will be 1.2 percent. Amazon is the top online retailer in Europe, with sales of 21 billion euro in 2015, which beats the next bestsellers, Otto Group and Tesco, by three and five times, respectively.

But the real disruption will occur when Amazon opens stores throughout the rest of the world, as it’s planning to in India. People may love Amazon’s selections, prices, and the convenience of buying online, but the number-one influencer on consumer decisions is still the store. People love to go into stores and feel things—real, traditional gatherer. This is especially true in grocery, where the instinct first developed. The grocery sector, ripe, certainly, to be disrupted, will see Amazon apply its tech expertise to store logistics, checkout, and delivery, setting new standards in the sector. Whole Foods had been criticized, and its stock price had fallen pre-acquisition because of its high prices. Amazon will have just the cure for that. Meanwhile the 460 Whole Foods stores become Amazon’s supply chain—a delivery hub for Amazon Fresh and a transit hub for its other operations. Whole Foods stores could also become locations for returning online orders of any kind, drastically cutting costs. Amazon wants to be within an hour of as many people as possible, and Whole Foods is a recipe for that.

Imagine if, in the United States, Amazon bought the post office or a gasoline station company. People are used to bombing in and out of these venues to pick up stuff. It’s currently building just such “click and collect” stores in Sunnyvale and San Carlos, both in Silicon Valley. That will send a message.

Amazon now offers everything you need, before you need it, delivered in an hour to the 500 million wealthiest households on the planet. Every consumer firm can pay a toll to access an infrastructure less expensive to rent from Amazon than to build itself. Nobody has the scale, trust, cheap capital, or robots to compete. This is all supported by an annual payment that includes all sorts of fun stuff: movies, music, and livestreams of NFL games. My bet is Amazon buys the rights to broadcast March Madness or the Super Bowl to juice their Prime membership . . . as they can.

Race to a Trillion

The circle is now complete. Amazon now has all the pieces in place for zero-click ordering—AI, purchase history, warehouses within twenty miles of 45 percent of the U.S. population, millions of SKUs, voice receptors in the wealthiest American households (Alexa), ownership of the largest cloud/big data service, 460 (soon thousands) brick-and-mortar stores, and the world’s most trusted consumer brand.

That is why Amazon will be the first $1 trillion market cap company.

Excerpted from The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway in agreement with Portfolio an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? Scott Galloway, 2017.