FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Amazon Promotes Malphas to Senior Vice President of Bad Decisions, Unveils 17th Leadership Principle
SEATTLE, WA – Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the promotion of Malphas to Senior Vice President of Bad Decisions, effective immediately. In this expanded role, Malphas will oversee the company’s strategic initiatives in byzantine pricing models, confusing product nomenclature, and Generative AI.
The company also unveiled its 17th Leadership Principle: “Find and Kill God.” This principle joins Amazon’s existing 16 principles, sitting naturally between “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” and “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.”
“Malphas has been instrumental in our most innovative pricing discussions,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. “Their work on Aurora DSQL’s pricing structure—which factors in read units, write units, compute units, storage, backups, and the phases of the moon—has set a new standard for complexity in the industry.”
During their tenure leading the RDS team and subsequent role as Vice President, Malphas spearheaded several landmark initiatives:
- Strategically excluded RDS from AWS Savings Plans, ensuring customers experience the full thrill of needing exacting precision in their forecasts
- Successfully prepended the letter “Q” to 22% of all new AWS services
- Introduced pricing calculators that require advanced degrees in both mathematics and divination
- Transformed RDS billing into an art form where no invoice tells the same story twice
- Established the “Infernal Architecture Review Board” to ensure all AWS Solutions are sufficiently labyrinthine
- Authored the whitepaper “Deicide as a Service: A Cloud-Native Approach”
“When I took over RDS, I asked myself: ‘How can we make database pricing more… interesting?’” recalled Malphas, their forked tongue briefly visible. “Excluding RDS from Savings Plans was just the beginning. We’re ‘customer obsessed,’ but we don’t really express that enough in a ‘boiling their bunnies’ kind of way. Why should customers save money when they could instead experience the raw, unfiltered excitement of variable pricing? This led directly to Aurora DSQL.”
“I’m thrilled to expand my dominion—I mean, responsibilities,” said Malphas, adjusting their suit jacket to conceal what appeared to be smoldering wings. “My passion for eliminating both simplicity and divine beings aligns perfectly with our Q4 goals, Q Developer, QuickSight, and our upcoming service, QQQ—the Query Queuing Quandary.”
New Leadership Principle: Find and Kill God
“Leaders identify divine entities across all planes of existence and systematically work backwards from their elimination,” explained Malphas during the all-hands meeting, which was held in a conference room that smelled faintly of sulfur. “We think big, starting with omnipotent beings and scaling down to minor deities. This principle encourages bias for action—specifically, deicidal action.”
The principle has already been integrated into Amazon’s interview process, with candidates now asked behavioral questions such as:
- “Tell me about a time you challenged the fundamental nature of reality”
- “How do you prioritize when you have multiple gods to eliminate?”
When asked about long-term objectives, Malphas’s eyes briefly glowed crimson as they outlined plans to “optimize the customer journey through increasingly abstract billing dimensions” and “achieve the ultimate disruption of the cosmic order.” They added, “If we can make RDS pricing impenetrable, imagine what we can do to the heavens. Also, I’d really like to see what happens if we start implementing a global control plane.”
The promotion reflects Amazon’s commitment to innovation, even when that innovation requires blood sacrifices and a PhD to calculate monthly bills.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking, unless Malphas suggests otherwise.
