David Zapolsky started his legal career in a Brooklyn courtroom prosecuting sex crimes. Last week, he stood on the global stage in New York representing Amazon at the 80th United Nations General Assembly, discussing AI, internet access expansion and what it means for a company of Amazon’s scale to engage responsibly with the world.
“When you get to be a company of our size and our visibility, people want to know what we think,” said Zapolsky, 62, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer. “We have investments all over the world, and most countries value those investments.”
Zapolsky, who joined Seattle-based Amazon in 1999 as the company’s first in-house litigator, has steadily grown his remit since becoming legal chief in 2012. In addition to leading one of the largest corporate legal departments in the world, he now oversees Amazon’s global public policy function—a portfolio that brings him into regular contact with heads of state, regulators and lawmakers around the globe.
That evolution was on full display during UNGA80, where Zapolsky met with leaders from countries including Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Kuwait and Vietnam to advance partnerships around Project Kuiper, Amazon’s $10 billion-plus initiative to provide high-speed broadband internet to unserved and underserved communities around the world through a network of 3,236 satellites the company is mounting on rockets and propelling into low Earth orbit.
“We had a successful satellite launch this morning,” Zapolsky told Law.com on Thursday. “That’s part of our work to build our global internet service.”
