Insider Inc. CEO Henry Blodget told CNBC on Wednesday that Jeff Bezos offered invaluable advice when the founder of Amazon invested in his media company.
Bezos, who will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, led a $ 5 million round of investment in the Blodget company in 2013. He was then about six years old and was known as Business Insider. In an interview with “Squawk Box,” Blodget recalled a discussion he had with Bezos about how he should distribute his time between management and the publisher.
“I had been writing all along. I was an editor and one of the things I asked him right after I invested was, ‘Listen, I have to keep writing and doing TV and that sort of thing or I have to stay like “Because the company has grown big enough to really have to do one or the other,” said Blodget.
Bezos responded by saying he really only had one application as an investor, Blodget reported. “He said, ‘I’ll beg you to stay as CEO.’ On Wednesday, Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, also described pressuring Bezos over reason.”[Bezos] He said, ‘Because you don’t even realize it, but every day you make dozens of small course corrections. You are all inventing a new model of journalism. You have an instinct for where you are going. “
According to Blodget, Bezos added: “” If you bring someone with experience, you’ll 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 these course corrections. “
Insider Inc. was sold to German publisher Axel Springer in a deal valued at nearly $ 450 million in 2015. Blodget remains CEO, but in 2017 he left the role of 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 the reins of Bezos, who founded the e-commerce titan more than 25 years ago and turned it into a world giant worth nearly $ 2 trillion. Jassy, a longtime lieutenant of Bezos, currently leads Amazon’s highly profitable cloud computing business.
The Insider chief said he trusts Jassy and believes Amazon “will be in good 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 problem “. “
“With companies of this size, they’re super oil companies. They have a huge boost,” Blodget said. “You can change several people at the top and you won’t see the impact from the outside for a long time because the company will continue to do what is raised.”
Prior to his tenure as CEO, Blodget covered Amazon as a very attentive Wall Street Internet analyst during the boom of the dot-coms. In December 1998, while working at brokerage firm CIBC Oppenheimer, it issued a notable price rise on Amazon and shares soared 19% in the following session.
Blodget continued to work for Merrill Lynch, but her investigation was scrutinized. Following an investigation into what the Securities and Exchange Commission called “undue influence of investment banking interests on research analysts in brokerage firms,” regulators banned it permanently from the securities industry on 2003. As part of a multimillion-dollar liquidation at the time, Blodget did not deny or admit the allegations made by the SEC.