Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Read online

  I venture that there seems to be some dissent within Saudi Arabia. ‘From what?’ demands the prince. Well, from the monarchy. ‘Where do you get that from?’ The newspapers. ‘Frankly speaking, I don’t see that at all. Most people in Saudi Arabia are really for the government. And, frankly speaking, if you look at so-called dissent outside Saudi Arabia, it’s only Saad al-Fagih [a dissident in London]. That’s superb. Population of 16 million indigenous and six million expatriates, you have one guy going publicly.’ It seems tactless to mention another prominent Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden.

  Yet as the prince knows, not everyone has a gleaming image of Saudi Arabia. Americans got particularly angry when 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 turned out to be Saudis. Did the prince take stakes in western media companies partly so that he could help clear up east–west misunderstandings?

  He begins with the standard denial: ‘My investment in the United States is not really to influence public policy.’ But then he adds: ‘When I meet Mr Murdoch of News Corp, that owns Fox News, and BSkyB, or when I meet Mr Parsons, who controls CNN, Fortune magazine, People, Time, America Online, I don’t intrude into the management of these companies. However, I do convey to them the message about where I believe they went wrong. It’s their discretion to decide what to do. My job is to open their eyes to things they may not have seen.’

  Could His Highness give an example? ‘One time CNN, they brought the Palestinians’ so-called terrorist act against Israelis. I communicated to them, “Look, you have to give the other side of the equation. Look what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.” And they did that. And they were censured and reprimanded by the Israelis. I do not claim it’s my right to intrude. But I have to do my best to try to influence events.’

  At News Corp, the prince is currently helping Murdoch rebuff an attack from the investor John Malone. No doubt it is for literary reasons alone that Murdoch’s HarperCollins has just published the hagiography Alwaleed: Businessman, Billionaire, Prince by the former CNN anchor Riz Khan. The prince has a copy by his side. ‘Foreworded by President Carter,’ he remarks. Then he says, ‘Yeah, it’s being foreworded by President Carter. President Carter. By President Carter.’

  ‘Wow,’ I finally reply.

  ‘President Carter,’ he says.

  Khan writes of the prince: ‘He’s fast-paced, incredibly organised, and a unique mix of Middle East and West … arguably, the hardest-working billionaire on the planet.’ In the book, the great man’s mother and Khan watch a video of the toddler prince chasing a goat until he catches it. She tells Khan, ‘It showed me even then how determined my son would be.’ What does the prince think of the book? ‘I think it reflects … reality.’ When President Chirac appears on the TV set, the prince murmurs, ‘Ouf, Chirac!’ and turns up the volume. We listen to Chirac intone about ‘respect’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. The prince knows Chirac. ‘I can meet any president, any king, any sultan, any president of a company. It’s a very unique position.’

  Does having lots of money make you happy? Only when you give it away, the prince reveals. ‘When the tsunami happened, I was the biggest single contributor in the world. When the Pakistan catastrophe happened, I am the … single biggest contributor on the globe. I went to Pakistan personally. The prime minister told me, “Prince, your visit is more important than what you can pay us.” ’

  We order coffee. When his arrives first, he insists on giving it to me, even though I have ordered a double and he a single. He resumes: ‘Something else gives me a kick: when I get involved in something that’s not successful, and all of a sudden it becomes good.’ He says Citigroup, for example, was ‘on its knees’ when he first invested in it. ‘And guess what: now it’s the first global bank in the world and number one company. George V – piece of rubbish. When I bought it, you order spaghetti, they say, “We have no spaghetti, give you rice.” Look what: you buy it, you shut it down, you fix it up. Guess what: number one hotel in the world, for five years.’ In short, unusually for a famed investor, Alwaleed appears to invest for motives other than profit.

  Still, he doesn’t miss a trick. When I rise and thank him for his time, he replies, ‘We have to pay the bill now.’ Then he offers to pay after all. I refuse. Luckily the bill is within reason – another benefit of dieting. I depart for the bottom bunk of a second-class compartment of a night train, leaving Alwaleed to unite east and west until his scheduled bedtime of dawn.

  GEORGE V HOTEL

  Paris

  * * *

  1 × rucola and tomato Salad

  1 × ceviche de crabe

  1 × chicken linguine

  1 × grapefruit juice

  1 × mineral water

  2 × coffee

  * * *

  Total €136

  * * *

  12 OCTOBER 2002

  Jeff Bezos

  Dotcom omnivore, hahaha

  The entrepreneur is as surprised as everyone else at his metamorphosis from New York banker to founder of Amazon, the online store

  By Andrew Davidson

  Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, says he is an omnivore. ‘I eat anything and everything,’ he grins, and laughs loudly, with his trademark, full-throttle guffaw. Then he selects from the menu: salad of Belgian endive with apples and walnuts, and grilled sea bass. And later, a pudding. Oh yes, he doesn’t want to miss the pudding.

  We are sitting in the upstairs restaurant of Home House, the members’ club on the north side of London’s Portman Square that Bezos uses as a base for his flying visits. It is vast and grand with long windows and over-decorated walls, a paean to paint effects. Standing by the blue-veined, faux-marbled staircase you feel you are sinking into a giant Stilton cheese.

  Bezos, 38, finds it cute, passageways to here and there, illogical ups-and-downs. He clearly has a romantic streak behind the brainy geek façade. Why else would the East Coast boy have chucked in a well-paid New York banker’s job eight years ago to head west and set up Amazon in a garage in Seattle?

  ‘Oh, I was never really a banker,’ he says, flashing his deep-brown eyes. Well, he could be. Medium-height, trim, bald, sleek as a fish in his well-pressed chinos, shirt and blazer.

  But he says he’s as surprised as everyone else at what’s happened to him. From 10 employees to 8,000 in little more than half a decade, generating billions of dollars of revenue, becoming one of the best-known entrepreneurs in America.

  Wine? ‘Nah, I don’t wanna fall asleep, this is 5am for me!’ He’d jetted in from America the day before and spent the evening at Gordon Ramsay’s dining his European management. Today he’s meeting the media to promote Amazon UK’s fourth birthday. He should be tired already but if he is, I wouldn’t want to meet him fresh. By turns incisive, giggly and earnestly loquacious, he is clearly button-bright, as you would expect from a man who read theoretical physics, electrical engineering and computer studies at Princeton. But he wears it all under a patina of infectious charm, which he uses to good effect.

  I wonder what made him want to set up his own business? ‘Oh, it was just a rational move,’ he says, sipping his mineral water. He’d stumbled on a website in 1994 that showed internet use growing at 2,300 per cent, thought, ‘Wow, I’ll have some of that,’ drew up a list of top ten products that would be good to sell online, plumped for books, decided on where the best place to hire software talent was, packed up the car and drove west.

  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.’

  W
hy?

  ‘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

  Anatoly Chubais

  The history maker

  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 t
han 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.