The Amazon Man

In the face of constant skepticism, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos patiently and persistently stuck to his plan — and created a $370 billion empire.

The people and companies that invent the future don’t always get to play in it. Thomas Edison’s reward for creating the lightbulb, the phonograph and the electric grid was to get crushed by financier J.P. Morgan. Robert Sarnoff’s RCA Corp. made the first colour TV sets, controlled the broadcast networks and dictated programming, dominating devices and content way before Steve Jobs even dreamed about doing it. RCA folded in 1986.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is well aware of this history. “Amazon will be disrupted one day. I don’t worry about it, because I know it’s inevitable,” he told 60 Minutes. “Companies come and go, and the companies that are the shiniest and the most important of any era — you wait a few decades and they’re gone.”

Yet when you look at the company Bezos continues to build, you see a guy erecting a forest of fences for competitors to climb before they can even get close to him. In 1996, Amazon.com was one of the Web’s alpha disrupters, an online bookstore with the outrageous goal of making every book ever published available in a minute — even if, in the early days, it was just Bezos, his wife, MacKenzie, and a few brainiac buddies filling orders in a Seattle garage. “Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift,” he said in announcing Amazon’s 2015 results. “This year, we pass US$100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers.”