Claim: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was building another mansion with elevators and 25 bathrooms at the same time part-time Whole Foods employees lost health benefits.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Jeff Bezos
text: Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act and accused Amazon of receiving corporate welfare. This followed revelations by the non-profit group New Food Economy which found that one third of Amazon workers in Arizona, and one tenth of Amazon workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, relied on food stamps. While preparing to introduce the bill, Sanders opined "Instead of attempting to explore Mars or go to the moon, how about Jeff Bezos pays his workers a living wage?" He later said "Bezos could play a profound role. If he said today, nobody who

title: Jeff Bezos
text: response from the public since 2016. Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a "New York Times" piece. Bezos used what he called a "regret-minimization framework" while he worked at D. E. Shaw and again during the early years of Amazon. He described this life philosophy by stating: "When I'm 80, am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes." During the 1990s and early 2000s at Amazon, he was characterized as trying

title: Jeff Bezos
text: & Co, a newly founded hedge fund, in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at the age of 30. In late 1993, Bezos decided to start an online bookstore. He left his job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a trip from New York to Seattle. Bezos named his new company "Amazon" after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter "A," which is at the beginning of the alphabet. He

title: Jeff Bezos
text: is employed at Amazon will receive less than a living wage, it would send a message to every corporation in America." Sanders's efforts elicited a response from Amazon which pointed to the 130,000 jobs it created in 2017 and called the $28,446 figure for its median salary "misleading" as it included part-time workers. However, Sanders countered that the companies targeted by his proposal have placed an increased focus on part-time workers to escape benefit obligations. On October 2, Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase which Sanders applauded. The American workers who were being paid the minimum wage had this increased

title: Jeff Bezos
text: total of only six hours a year. Instead of using PowerPoints, Bezos requires high-level employees to present information with six-page narratives. Starting in 1998, Bezos publishes an annual letter for Amazon shareholders wherein he frequently refers to five principles: focus on customers not competitors, take risks for market leadership, facilitate staff morality, build a company culture, and empower people. Bezos maintains the email address "jeff@amazon.com" as an outlet for customers to reach out to him and the company. Although he does not respond to the emails, he forwards some of them with a question mark in the subject line to

title: Unfulfilled
text: family’s frequent purchases on that website are driving it deeper into debt. In addition, many local businesses have closed since the center opened, due to the public's preference for buying things online. Stephen's co-worker, Josh Carter, is accidentally grabbed by a sorting robot and compressed into a small package, which Amazon blames on "human error." This outrages the facility's boxers, who go on strike, shutting down the fulfillment center, and delaying the fulfillment of the public's orders. Members of the public form a counter-protest urging the boxers to return to work so that they can receive their purchases. Jeff Bezos,

title: Jeff Bezos
text: 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare. His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon. Bezos was a multi-billionaire who hung his clothes on a rack in his Amazon headquarters office and drove a 1996 Honda Accord. Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy, often wearing ill-fitting clothing and making a variety of social missteps. Bezos was seen by the public as needlessly quantitative and data-driven. This perception was detailed by

title: Jeff Bezos
text: labor rights, and satisfactory working conditions of select Amazon workers. On July 17, 2018 he was designated the "wealthiest person in modern history" by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, "Fortune", "MarketWatch", "The Wall Street Journal", and "Forbes". In 1992, Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan, New York, when he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; they were married a year later. In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. He and his wife are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from

title: Jeff Bezos
text: Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos (; born Jorgensen; January 12, 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Amazon. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He founded Amazon in late 1994 on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has

title: Jeff Bezos
text: to quantify all aspects of running the company, often listing employees on spreadsheets and basing executive decisions on data. To push Amazon forward, Bezos developed the mantra "Get Big Fast", which spoke to the company's need to scale its operations and establish market dominance. He favored diverting Amazon profits back into the company in lieu of allocating it amongst shareholders in the form of dividends. Bezos uses the term "work–life harmony" instead of the more standard work–life balance because he believes balance implies that you can have one and not the other. He believes that work and home life are

title: Jeff Bezos
text: closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce. In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million. In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle. According to a 2008 "Time" profile, Bezos wished to create the same flow state found in video game simulations in books; he wished readers would fully engage with books. In 2013, Bezos secured a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services. In October that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world. In May

title: Amazon (company)
text: as a brick-and-mortar retailer. The acquisition was interpreted by some as a direct attempt to challenge Walmart's traditional retail stores. In 2018, for the first time, Jeff Bezos released in Amazon's shareholder letter the number of Amazon Prime subscribers, which is 100 million worldwide. In 2018, Amazon.com contributed to the Wikimedia Endowment. In November 2018, Amazon announced it would be splitting its second headquarters project between two cities. They are currently in the finalization stage of the process. The company was founded as a result of what Jeff Bezos called his "regret minimization framework", which described his efforts to fend

title: Amazon (company)
text: such employees from finding other work. Even short-term temporary workers have to sign contracts that prohibit them from working at any company where they would "directly or indirectly" support any good or service that competes with those they helped support at Amazon, for 18 months after leaving Amazon, even if they are fired or made redundant. A 2015 front-page article in "The New York Times" profiled several former Amazon employees who together described a "bruising" workplace culture in which workers with illness or other personal crises were pushed out or unfairly evaluated. Bezos responded by writing a Sunday memo to

title: Jeff Bezos
text: wife, Amazon employees, and the public as a mischaracterization. During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for imperialistic business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money. His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company. His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parodied as an enterprising super villain.

title: Jeff Bezos
text: interconnected, informing and calibrating each other. Journalist Walt Mossberg dubbed the idea that someone who cannot tolerate criticism or critique shouldn't do anything new or interesting, "". Bezos does not schedule early morning meetings and enforces a two pizza rule–a preference for meetings to be small enough to where two pizzas can feed everyone in the board room. When interviewing candidates for jobs at Amazon he has stated he considers three inquiries: can he admire the person, can the person raise the common standard, and under what circumstances could the person become exemplary. He meets with Amazon investors for a

title: Jeff Bezos
text: Pi and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. After Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1987, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a financial telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust; he worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw

title: Jeff Bezos
text: Bezos supports his philanthropic efforts through direct donations and non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions. Through Bezos Expeditions, he has funded the Bezos Center for Innovation at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry for $10 million and Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute for $15 million. He has donated multiple times to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center: $10 million in 2009, $20 million in 2010, $15 million in 2011, and $35 million in 2017. He also donated $800,000 to Worldreader, a non-profit, founded by a former Amazon employee. In 2015, he funded the recovery

title: Bernie Sanders
text: "if you bag groceries, you should be able to buy groceries." Sanders said, "Taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who's worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day," referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The bill has received some support from conservatives; Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson endorsed the proposal on air. On October 2, 2018, Bezos raised the minimum wage at Amazon to $15, effective November 1; Sanders commended him. Senators participate in committees that are responsible for certain types of legislation and in caucuses that build a legislative constituency

title: Amazon (company)
text: had 30,000 full-time employees in the USA, and by the end of 2016, it had 180,000 employees. In June 2017, Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion. The acquisition was seen by media experts as a move to strengthen its physical holdings and challenge Walmart's supremacy as a brick and mortar retailer. This sentiment was heightened by the fact that the announcement coincided with Walmart's purchase of men's apparel company Bonobos. On August 23, 2017, Whole Foods shareholders, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, approved the deal.

title: Jeff Bezos
text: billion in 2017. He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life-extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging. Bezos is involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, Grail, Juno Therapeutics, and ZocDoc. In January 2018, an announcement was made concerning Bezos's role within a new, unnamed healthcare company. This venture is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. Journalist Nellie Bowles of "The New York Times" has described the public persona and personality of Bezos as that of "a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan". During the