At Amazon, “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers .”

That description—with parts bolded for emphasis by this reporter—sits at the top of a webpage on Amazon’s corporate jobs site under a subtitle that reads “Customer Obsession,” which is the first and most famous Leadership Principle that Amazon has long said should guide how its employees act. Amazon’s Leadership Principles are so crucial to the company’s culture that CEO Andy Jassy last year filmed an hour-long tutorial on them, as factors including rapid hiring over the past decade have threatened to erode them .

But in a federal courtroom in Seattle, Washington, this week, Amazon’s fame

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