Insider Inc. CEO Henry Blodget told CNBC on Wednesday that Jeff Bezos offered invaluable advice when the founder of Amazon invested in his upstream media company.
Bezos, who will step down as Amazon CEO later this year, led a $ 5 million round of investment in Blodget in 2013. He was about six years old at the time and was known as Business Insider. In an interview with Squawk Box, Blodget recalled a discussion he had with Bezos about how he should spend his time between management and the editorial.
“I had been writing all along. I was an editor and one of the things I asked right after he invested was, ‘Listen, should I keep writing and doing TV and that sort of thing, or should I remain CEO? Because the company has become big enough that I really have to do one or the other, ”Blodget said.
Bezos responded by saying he has only one application as an investor, Blodget said. “He said, ‘I will beg you to remain CEO.'” On Wednesday, Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, also described the pressure on Bezos. “[Bezos] he said: “Because you don’t even realize it, but every day you make dozens of small corrections to the course. You all invent a new model for journalism. You have an instinct as to where this is going. “
According to Blodget, Bezos added: “If you bring in someone else with experience, you will want to give them plenty of space to make their own decisions. These will take place for a long time and will change things. He said, “I’m investing because I want you to make those course adjustments.”
Insider Inc. was sold to German publisher Axel Springer in a business valued at nearly $ 450 million in 2015. Blodget remains CEO, but in 2017 he resigned as editor-in-chief.
Blodget recalled the conversation a day after Amazon announced that Bezos would move from CEO to chief executive later this year. Andy Jassy will take over the reins from Bezos, which founded the e-commerce titanium more than 25 years ago and turned it into a world monster worth nearly $ 2 trillion. Jassy, a longtime lieutenant of Bezos, currently runs Amazon’s highly profitable cloud computing company.
The head of Insider said he trusts Jassy and believes Amazon will be “in great shape for a while”, adding that it will likely take three to five years before outsiders can determine whether the change of CEO will be “a big deal.”
“With companies of this size, they’re super tanks. They have a huge boost,” Blodget said. “You can change more people from the top and you won’t see the impact from the outside for a long time because the company will continue to do what it did.”
Prior to becoming CEO of Media, Blodget covered Amazon as an Internet analyst on Wall Street, closely watched during the dot-com boom. In December 1998, while working for the brokerage firm CIBC Oppenheimer, it issued a noticeable increase in prices on Amazon, and the shares increased by 19% in the following session.
Blodget continued to work for Merrill Lynch, but her research was examined. Following an investigation into what the Securities Commission called “the unjustified influence of investment banking interests on research analysts at brokerage firms”, regulators banned it permanently from the securities industry in 2003. of a multi-million dollar settlement at the time, Blodget did not deny or admit the allegations made by the SEC.