An Interview with Jason Del Rey About Muse, Amazon, and Walmart (Stratechery Interview, 2026-10-01)

Why this is in the vault

Format note up front: this is a Stratechery Interview, not one of Thompson's solo thought-leadership Updates — Jason Del Rey (veteran e-commerce reporter, Recode alum, author of Winner Sells All, now independent publisher of The Aisle) is the guest and co-source, interviewed as the continuation of last week's Amazon-blocks-Muse story through the older Amazon/Walmart rivalry he has covered for over a decade.

The core argument

• Del Rey's background: Recode e-commerce beat, a 2023 book on the Amazon/Walmart rivalry, and a 10-month-old independent newsletter (The Aisle) he calls his likely last job, monetized through subscriber dinners with a sponsor rather than ads.
• Walmart history: internal 1990s e-commerce experiments were dismissed by then-CEO David Glass ("never bigger than one year of sales at a Sam's Club store"); years of turf wars between store and e-commerce execs followed, resolved only once the 2016 Jet.com/Marc Lore acquisition and the pandemic forced curbside investment.
• Walmart's abandoned Jetblack concierge service (late 2010s) is framed as a "90s idea ahead of its infrastructure" — money-losing without AI-era economics, killed by CEO Doug McMillon despite a $300M outside-funding offer: a direct historical precedent for why Walmart is now willing to sign onto Meta's Muse.
• Live user testing of Muse: Del Rey reports it failing routine tasks (blocked by CAPTCHAs, can't complete third-party logins, can't spin up a disposable email address), which he frames as early-days friction rather than disqualifying.
• Amazon/Meta dynamics: blocking Muse protects Amazon's ad business and purchase-history data moat; Thompson floats Amazon's new OpenAI ad deal as the more likely real counter-move (become the ad surface inside ChatGPT rather than fight every agent).
• Walmart, Shopify, and Google all take different agentic-commerce stances: Walmart joins Muse as an underdog play (the iPhone/second-carrier analogy); Shopify is "all in on Muse as long as merchants use Shop Pay"; Google's checkout play (UCP with Shopify) is stalled because agentic checkout cannibalizes its ad business, same as its decade of failed grocery/checkout bets.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Mapping strength: weak. The one concrete, usable data point is Del Rey's hands-on account of Muse failing ordinary tasks — CAPTCHA blocks, broken third-party logins, no ability to spin up a throwaway email — reported by someone trying to make it work, not a critic. That is real ground-truth evidence of how far "agents in production" still are from reliable autonomous action in late 2026, which is directly useful color for [[project_credibility_for_phdata_sales]]'s domain (agents in production) and for [[project_l5_north_star_strategic_direction]]'s "bets are downstream of agent capability" framing: shopping-agent failure modes here are the same genus as enterprise-agent failure modes RDCO already tracks (brittle auth flows, no graceful hand-off to a human, confident-sounding self-grading that doesn't match actual task completion).

Past that one thread, the honest read is this episode is retail-industry history and trade-press biography — the Walmart/Amazon turf-war backstory, Jetblack, Del Rey's own newsletter business model — and it does not sharpen any live RDCO decision the way the preceding week's Stratechery Updates did. Don't force it: this note exists to preserve the Jetblack precedent and the Muse failure-mode anecdote for later reference, not because the interview as a whole advances RDCO strategy.

Related

• [[2026-09-22-stratechery-amazon-blocks-muse-aggregator-moat]] — the story this interview was commissioned to react to; Amazon blocking Muse is the news hook for the whole conversation
• [[2026-09-23-stratechery-muse-walmart-expedia-google]] — covers the same Walmart-joins-Muse and Google-checkout-paralysis threads Del Rey discusses here, from Thompson's solo analysis a week earlier
• [[2026-09-28-stratechery-apps-agents-aggregation-inspiration]] — the aggregation-theory-for-agents frame this interview's shopping-agent anecdotes are a worked example of
• [[project_credibility_for_phdata_sales]]
• [[project_l5_north_star_strategic_direction]]

Sponsorship and bias

sponsored: false — no sponsor block in this issue; standard Stratechery subscription footer only. Background bias to flag: Del Rey discloses his own business model mid-interview (subscriber dinners with "one smart sponsor," not ad-supported), which is a generic beat-reporter incentive (access to the same Amazon/Walmart/Meta executives he covers) rather than a specific undisclosed conflict tied to this episode's content. No stated financial relationship between Del Rey and Amazon, Walmart, Meta, or Shopify beyond press-access reporting.