What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

Even if you’ve never enjoyed Noah Hawley’s television work—Fargo, Legion, Alien: Earth—this chronicle of his time at Jeff Bezos’s annual gathering known as Campfire demonstrates that he knows how to instill a creeping sense of dread. Here are dozens of people, most of them prodigiously accomplished in their fields, invited to spend a few days listening to other prodigiously accomplished people. All that brainpower and ambition, and yet most of them seemed flummoxed, if not outright discomfited, by their own presence. Was this TED by way of Bohemian Grove? Yaddo for the stratospherically successful? Or was it simply, as Hawley makes clear, a playground for a man who has effectively isolated himself from life as most people experience it?

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.