I'm Liz Hayes by Liz Hayes

Author:Liz Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

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I might have felt surprisingly at home in the desert, but it was while out of my comfort zone that I conducted some of my most fascinating interviews, in the rarefied air of the seriously successful and rudely rich.

My itinerary in 1999 was again jam-packed, but with a heavy emphasis on the big end of town. From American media mogul Ted Turner to Hustler adult magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart, Western Australia’s famously successful Paspaley pearling family, and the impossibly tall and highly paid Australian NBA basketballer Luke Longley.

This year would also mark my first encounter with the razor-sharp actor and comedian Barry Humphries, before immersing myself in a story about the business of building unimaginably mega cruise ships.

And my 60 Minutes career was only getting started.

But perhaps one of the more mesmerising experiences that year was spending time with two of the first and biggest billionaires to make their money from the internet: Pierre Omidyar, creator of eBay, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

Omidyar’s online flea market had turned into the world’s largest internet auction site after his wife’s desire to collect lolly dispensers got him thinking, while Bezos had been working on Wall Street when he started observing the impact of the internet and set up an online business selling books.

Their success, even to them back then, was unbelievable.

Bezos, whose most striking feature was a loud and slightly awkward laugh, was especially amazed, and didn’t mind saying so. He believed if anyone back then had claimed he’d make billions, they’d be viewed as needing to be ‘institutionalised’.

Amazon had started with 15 investors, mostly his family and friends, and he’d warned them they might lose their money. He created the business, he said, so as not to regret that he hadn’t. It was a hunch he felt he had to act on, just in case he was right. He told me he’d been described as a nerd aspiring to be a geek, and he thought that was about right.

The Bezos I met was hugely likeable and didn’t seem to indulge in conspicuous consumption. Amazon was based in Seattle and he happily spent the day showing us around the city. His office was far from grand; he worked at a desk built from an old door. And at the time he was thinking of trading in his dated Honda car and spending some of his outrageous wealth upgrading to a Volvo, because it had extra airbags.

As we walked along the aisles of his massive book business, passing his workers – many of whom, he said, had stock options – I had to marvel at the Bezos brain. I would feel the same many years later when I interviewed Elon Musk. Both are entrepreneurs who seem to think very differently from others and who plunged head-first into the business of risk. It didn’t always make them popular, but it did make them rich.

Bezos, who now has his eyes on flying into space, was for a time the world’s richest man.

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