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Jeff Green has always been more than a CEO.

He’s been adtech’s preacher, a strategist with a sermon, selling the idea that an “open internet” could survive the monopolies.

He plays the role like he was born to it — part revival tent evangelist, part Wall Street chess master, part antagonist to Big Tech’s favorite empires.

For almost a decade, it worked. Amazingly well, beyond any analyst’s projections.

The Trade Desk grew from a “launch a DSP” phone call into the largest independent demand-side platform in the world.

Green convinced advertisers and publishers alike that there was a path between the walled gardens — Google, Meta, Amazon — where they could transact without being trapped, taxed, or tricked.

I’m in awe of him — for the improbable climb, the defiance, and the ability to make independence sound like a competitive superpower.

It was a noble story.
It was also great business.

At 9:30 AM, The Trade Desk opened on the NASDAQ at $87.24. By the close, it sat at $53.46 — a 39% plunge in a single trading day.

The biggest collapse in company history.

Billions in market cap gone in hours.

The headlines said “earnings beat.” The footnotes told the real story:

And then there was the reason no one wanted to say too loudly: Amazon DSP is no longer a shadow on the horizon. It’s parked on The Trade Desk’s lawn.

Amazon’s Q2 ad revenue: $15.7 billion, up 23% year-over-year.
The Trade Desk’s Q2 ad revenue: $694 million, up 19%.

Amazon added more than $3 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter — four times The Trade Desk’s total haul.

They did it with exclusive CTV inventory from Prime Video, integrations with Disney and Roku, and first-party shopping data that tells an advertiser not just who you are, but what you bought last night, what you almost bought, and what you’re probably going to buy next Thursday.

Amazon owns the data, and it knows exactly how to use it.

And they’re cheaper — as low as 1% of spend for certain guaranteed deals, compared to The Trade Desk’s 7–15% take.

This isn’t David vs. Goliath.
This is Goliath with his own media network, checkout button, streaming empire, and a cost advantage that makes CFOs salivate.

The Trade Desk: We’re the independent champion of the open web.
Amazon DSP: We’re the open web now — plus the closed web, the connected TV, and the store where you actually check out.

Independence sounds noble. But in a market that rewards speed, exclusivity, and data dominance, nobility is a luxury.

Wall Street buys velocity, not virtue — and right now, Amazon is running sprints while The Trade Desk is delivering a sermon on fair play.

It’s easy to forget how improbable Green’s climb was. Before The Trade Desk, the DSP market already looked like a crowded freeway. The safe answer would have been don’t bother.

Instead, Green built a platform designed to not be Google — one that wouldn’t own content, wouldn’t privilege its own inventory, and would compete solely on tech and transparency.

That refusal to play landlord in a walled garden became his brand.

Half of TTD’s revenue now comes from connected TV — a bet he placed before most of his competitors had even stopped selling pop-ups.

Acquisitions? Rare. Not because he couldn’t, but because he saw them as the executive’s version of junk food — tempting in the moment, corrosive over time.

The Open Internet Evangelist:
Green’s speeches on the open internet are part manifesto, part war cry. He’s the guy who will call out Google by name for killing competition, and do it with the fervor of someone who’s memorized the antitrust playbook.

Breaking with the Mormon Church:
In 2021, Green resigned from the LDS Church in public, blasting its anti-LGBTQ+ stance and financial opacity. He paired it with a $600,000 donation to Equality Utah. It was a calculated act of principle — one that cemented his image as a leader willing to stand for something, even when it meant losing something.

Philanthropy-as-Data-Science:
For Green, giving isn’t sentimental. It’s statistical. He runs philanthropy like a product launch — measuring outcomes, running A/B tests, applying the same analytical rigor to scholarships and social programs that he does to CPM optimization.

The charisma, the convictions, the clean moral lines — they’re a moat. Clients buy not just The Trade Desk’s platform, but the sense they’re backing the good guys.

In the past few months, Green blocked at least half a dozen journalists on LinkedIn, reportedly upset by the first wave of sustained negative coverage in his career.

This just shows he’s human. Nothing more. Even visionaries have moments where the criticism lands harder than they expect.

Jeff Green’s decision-making style at The Trade Desk is instinct-driven and marked by an unyielding belief in his own vision.

The guy has been building ad-tech companies since the dot-com bubble and, somehow, still likes showing up at industry conferences like it’s his first day on the job. But behind that unshakeable confidence is a leadership style that demands swift, gut-driven decisions.

As one CEO put it:
“It’s always fast gut. He doesn’t waste time with consensus-building or second-guessing. If you’re not on board, you’re out. It’s as simple as that. He’s not interested in debate. He’s here to execute, and he’s doing it with unwavering conviction.”

That’s Green’s modus operandi: speed over deliberation, conviction over compromise. The Trade Desk was built on decisive moves, on going after the open web and pushing against the monopolies of Google, Meta, and Amazon, with no time for hesitation or doubt. Green trusts his gut like a lion trusts its claws — and he’s been rewarded for it.

But now, that same speed and confidence are facing a serious test.

The 40% plunge wasn’t just a blip. It was the culmination of Amazon’s increasingly aggressive push into programmatic ads, global economic headwinds, and leadership uncertainty. All of this came on the heels of a slower-than-expected growth rate, which had analysts comparing Green’s 19% revenue growth to Amazon’s rapid ad expansion.

And through all this, Green stuck to his guns, downplaying Amazon’s threat and insisting that his model would prevail.

The source continues:
“He likes what he’s doing. He believes what he says — it’s mission-driven for him. He wants to prove all those short sellers from almost a decade ago how wrong they were.”

But what happens when the world changes? When your competitors are eating your lunch, and you’re still trying to serve the same menu? Green’s unyielding optimism — his fast gut decisions, his belief that he’s always right — can look rigid in times of disruption.

When it comes to Amazon DSP, Green’s confidant wasn’t ready to fully acknowledge the threat:

“Not sure,” our anonymous CEO admitted. “Jeff’s always been focused on his big customers and his own beliefs, but even he can feel that Amazon is closing in. It’s hard for him to admit, but the unease is real.”

Green has tried to position Amazon as a potential partner.

But Amazon isn’t having it. In fact, it quickly became clear that Amazon wasn’t interested in playing nice.

Instead of collaboration, they were aiming to crush The Trade Desk’s position in the market.

While Green believed in the open internet and hoped for some sort of cooperation with Amazon, the reality was much harsher. Amazon made it clear they weren’t just another player — they were coming for The Trade Desk’s market share.

Independence made The Trade Desk powerful.
Now it’s the thing the market might stop rewarding.

Premium CTV inventory is tightening into proprietary pipes. UID 2.0 and OpenPath are either the future of interoperability… or a subtler form of gatekeeping, depending on who you ask.

Green’s still the preacher, the builder, the strategist.
But the congregation is restless — and Amazon’s church down the street has better coffee, more parking, and the kind of targeting that makes independence sound quaint.

Jeff Green doesn’t describe the open web like a market; he describes it like a fortress under siege.

“CTV is the last great frontier for the open web,” he said in this interview with Terry Kawaja. “If the open web doesn’t remain the owner of that channel, there is no open web.”

For him, 2025 is the tipping point — the year the open web either holds its ground or collapses entirely. This isn’t a metaphor to him; it’s a survival equation.

“There’s no Google, there’s no Facebook, nothing like that,” he says. “Netflix? Ten percent of TV screen time. That’s not a 75% monopoly like search or social.”

CTV’s value, he argues, comes from three factors: authentication, the fact that “so many opinions are shaped there,” and “it’s roughly half the TAM” — the total addressable market. Add those together, and you have the one channel where the open web can still plant its flag.

Green’s battle plan revolves around Sellers and Publishers 500+ and OpenPass, tools designed, he says, “to make it easy to pick a safe circle to buy your media in. With just a few hundred titles you can get most of the traffic of the open internet.”

The pitch isn’t just operational; it’s moral. “Journalism is the only profession called out in the U.S. Constitution,” he reminds his audience. “It is critical to running democracies. I really do believe CTV can save journalism — period. It may be the only hope.”

The urgency is grounded in grim numbers: “Eighty percent decline in advertising support for journalism in the last fifteen years. Fifty percent fewer people working in newsrooms.” He recalls a Gannett-owned local paper reduced to one employee — “the woman who answers the phone for obituaries” — a metaphor, in his mind, for the slow death of local news. “The walled gardens can’t be blamed for killing it, but they won’t save it either. We can — and it doesn’t cost us much of anything.”

This is where Green leans in: he wants you to believe that his systems, his curated lists, his authentication layers are there to fund the ‘good guys.’

That’s where the skepticism begins. In Jeff Green’s world, he decides who the ‘good guys’ are. Many point out that The Trade Desk owns The Current, a slick, in-house media outlet presented as independent but 100% controlled by him. Instead of funding small, independent publishers, he built his own.

Those without scale or leverage to get into Sellers and Publishers 500+ say they’re cut out entirely.

One independent publisher told me flatly: “Jeff’s open web is just The Trade Desk’s web. And if you’re not in it, you’re not getting saved.”

Green’s larger vision ties CTV directly to retail media networks. “CTV and Retail are the last hopes of the open internet,” he says. “It is CTV and Retail that will bring down the walls of the walled gardens.”

The combination, he argues, is the “Holy Grail” — logged-in, pristine environments at both the upper and lower funnel, allowing full journey planning and attribution. “That’s when the flywheel really spins,” he says, “and when the open web gets the first dollar instead of the scraps.”

For Green, the urgency couldn’t be higher. “This is the tipping point — not just for TV, but for the open internet. Identity is under siege. Cookies are going away. The election year raises the stakes. And we don’t have a ton of time.”

He warns that the collapse won’t be gradual. “Nothing dies in a straight line. It goes like this…” — he makes a slow downward motion with his hand — “…and then it falls off a cliff.”

That’s the Jeff Green proposition: CTV as the lifeboat, retail media as the engine, authentication as the rudder, journalism as the moral ballast. The question — one he can’t answer with a product roadmap or a constitutional quote — is whether he’s actually funding the good guys, or just defining the good guys so they look a lot like Jeff Green.

Because if CTV really is the last great frontier, the man claiming to save the fort may also be the one quietly locking the gates.

Amazon isn’t just competing with The Trade Desk — it’s building a siege wall around it. With Disney, Hulu, and Roku integrations, fees as low as 1%, and the industry’s deepest first-party data, Amazon DSP is offering brands premium CTV access, closed-loop attribution, and lower costs in one package. That’s pulling tens of millions in spend away from TTD.

Behind the scenes, some insiders say there’s even a personal vendetta fueling the push.

This isn’t just market share pressure — it’s a slow squeeze that could force Jeff Green to survive, partner, or sell.