by Walter Isaacson

I AM OFTEN ASKED who, of the people living today, I would consider to be in the same league as those I have written about as a biographer: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einstein. All were very smart. But that’s not what made them special. Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator. And that’s why my answer to the question is Jeff Bezos.

So, what are the ingredients of creativity and imagination, and what makes me think that Bezos belongs in the same league as my other subjects?

The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue? What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Do a bird’s wings move faster when flapping up or when flapping down? How is the pattern of swirling water similar to that of curling hair? Is the muscle of the bottom lip connected to that of the top lip? Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa (though it helped); he needed to know them because he was Leonardo, always obsessively curious. “I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”

A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said at one of these presentations. “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” Einstein, likewise, realized how important it is to interweave the arts and the sciences. When he felt stymied in his quest for the theory of general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart, saying that the music helped connect him to the harmony of the spheres. From Leonardo da Vinci, we have the greatest symbol of this connection between the arts and sciences: Vitruvian Man, his drawing of a nude male standing in a circle and a square, a triumph of anatomy, math, beauty, and spirituality.

In fact, it helps to be excited by all disciplines. Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin wanted to know everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable. They studied anatomy and botany and music and art and weaponry and water engineering and everything in between. People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature. Both Franklin and Leonardo were fascinated by whirlwinds and swirling water. That helped Franklin figure out how storms move up the coast and to chart the Gulf Stream. It helped Leonardo understand how the heart valve works as well as to paint both the water rippling by the ankles of Jesus in the Baptism of Christ and the curls of the Mona Lisa.

Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode in which aliens create an entire new world through sheer mental force. When his colleagues protested that one of Jobs’s ideas or proposals would be impossible to implement, he would use a trick he learned from a guru in India: he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.” It usually worked. He drove people mad, he drove them to distraction, but he also drove them to do things they didn’t believe they could do.

Related to that is the ability to “think different,” as Jobs put it in a memorable set of Apple ads. The science community at the beginning of the twentieth century was puzzling over how the speed of light seemed to remain constant no matter how fast the observer was moving toward or away from the source. At the time Albert Einstein was a third-class patent clerk in Switzerland who was studying devices that sent signals between different clocks in order to synchronize them. He came up with an out-of-the-box thought based on his realization that people who were in different states of motion would have different perceptions of whether the clocks were synchronized. Perhaps the speed of light is always constant, he theorized, because time itself is relative depending on one’s state of motion. It took the rest of the physics community a few years to realize that this “theory of relativity” was right.

One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. Our teachers and parents, becoming impatient, tell us to stop asking so many silly questions. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years—or to let our children do so.

Jeff Bezos embodies these traits. He has never outgrown his wonder years. He retains an insatiable, childlike, and joyful curiosity about almost everything. His interest in narrative and storytelling not only comes from Amazon’s roots in the bookselling business; it is also a personal passion. As a kid, Bezos read dozens of science fiction novels each summer at a local library, and he now hosts an annual retreat for writers and moviemakers. Likewise, although his interest in robotics and artificial intelligence was sparked because of Amazon, these fields have grown to become intellectual passions, and he now hosts another gathering each year that brings together experts interested in machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. He collects historical artifacts from great moments in science, exploration, and discovery. And he connects this love of the humanities and his passion for technology to his instinct for business.

That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.

Of course, he also has some of the infuriating traits that distinguished Steve Jobs and others. Despite his fame and influence, he has remained, behind his boisterous laugh, somewhat of an enigma. But through his life tale and writings, it is possible to get a sense of what drives him.

When Jeff Bezos was a young kid—big eared, with a booming laugh and insatiable curiosity—he spent his summers on the sprawling South Texas ranch of his maternal grandfather, Lawrence Gise, an upright but loving naval commander who had helped develop the hydrogen bomb as an assistant director of the Atomic Energy Commission. There Jeff learned self-reliance. When a bulldozer broke, he and his grandfather built a crane to lift out the gears and fix them. Together they castrated the cattle, built windmills, laid pipe, and had long conversations about the frontiers of science, technology, and space travel. “He did all his own veterinary work,” Bezos recalls. “He would make his own needles to suture up the cattle with. He would take a piece of wire, use a blowtorch to heat it up, pound it flat, sharpen it, drill a hole through it—make a needle. Some of the cattle even survived.”

Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind. His grandfather would take him to the library, which had a huge collection of science fiction books. Over the summers Jeff worked his way through the shelves, reading hundreds of them. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein became his favorites, and later in life he would not only quote them but also occasionally invoke their rules, lessons, and lingo.

His self-reliance and adventurous spirit were also instilled by Jeff’s mother, Jackie, who was just as tenacious and sharp as her father and son. She became pregnant with Jeff when she was only seventeen. “She was a high school student,” Jeff explains. “You’re probably thinking, ‘Wow in 1964 in Albuquerque, it was probably really cool to be a pregnant girl.’ No, it wasn’t. It took a lot of grit. And a lot of help from her parents. The high school actually even tried to kick her out of school. I guess they thought pregnancy might be contagious. And my grandfather being a cool and wise guy negotiated a deal with the principal that allowed her to stay and finish high school.” What was the main lesson Jeff learned from her? “You grow up with a mother like that and you have unbelievable grit,” he says.

Jeff’s biological father ran a bicycle store and performed in a circus unicycle troupe. He and Jackie were married only briefly. When Jeff was four, his mother remarried. Her second husband was a better match, a person who also taught Jeff the value of grit and determination: Miguel Bezos, known as Mike. He, too, was self-reliant and adventurous. He had come to the United States at age sixteen as a refugee from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, traveling on his own and wearing a jacket his mother had sewed for him out of household rags. After he married Jackie, he adopted her lively son, who took his last name and forever after considered him his real father.

As a five-year-old in July 1969, Jeff watched television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. It was a seminal moment. “I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents,” he says. “Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement. They know something extraordinary is happening. That definitely became a passion of mine.” Among other things, his exhilaration about space turned him into one of those hard-core Star Trek fans who knows every episode.

At his Montessori preschool Bezos was already fanatically focused. “The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me,” he recalls. “And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s still probably true today.”

In 1974, when he was ten, his passion for Star Trek led him to computers. He discovered that he could play a space video game on the terminal in the computer room of his elementary school in Houston, where his father was working for Exxon. This was in the days before personal computers, and a dial-up modem connected the school’s computer terminal to the mainframe of a company that had donated its excess computer time. “We had a teletype that was connected by an old acoustic modem,” Bezos says. “You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle. And nobody—none of the teachers knew how to operate this computer, nobody did. But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing.… And then, we learned that the mainframe programmers in some central location somewhere in Houston had already programmed this computer to play Star Trek. And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek.”

His mother encouraged his love of electronics and mechanics by shuttling him to and from RadioShack and letting him turn the family garage into a science project lab. She even indulged his penchant for creating ingenious booby traps to frighten his younger brother and sister. “I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps,” he says. “My mom is a saint, because she would drive me to RadioShack multiple times a day.”

His childhood business heroes were Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. “I’ve always been interested in inventors and invention,” he says. Even though Edison was the more prolific inventor, Bezos came to admire Disney more because of the audacity of his vision. “It seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a vision that he could get a large number of people to share,” he says. “Things that Disney invented, like Disneyland, the theme parks, they were such big visions that no single individual could ever pull them off, unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on. Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.”

By the time he was in high school, his family had moved to Miami. Bezos was a straight-A student, somewhat nerdy, and still completely obsessed with space exploration. He was chosen as the valedictorian of his class, and his speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our fragile planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded.

He went to Princeton with the goal of studying physics. It sounded like a smart plan until he smashed into a course on quantum mechanics. One day he and his roommate were trying to solve a particularly difficult partial differential equation, and they went to the room of another person in the class for help. He stared at it for a moment, then gave them the answer. Bezos was amazed that the student had done the calculation—which took three pages of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.” It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.

After graduation Bezos went to New York to apply his computer skills to the financial industry. He ended up at a hedge fund run by David E. Shaw, which used computer algorithms to discover pricing disparities in the financial markets. Bezos took to the work with a disciplined zeal. Foreshadowing the workplace fanaticism he would later try to instill at Amazon, he kept a sleeping bag in his office in case he wanted to sleep there after a late night of work.

While working at the hedge fund in 1994, Bezos came across the statistic that the web had been growing by more than 2,300 percent each year. He decided that he wanted to get aboard that rocket, and he came up with the idea of opening a retail store online, sort of a Sears catalogue for the digital age. Realizing that it was prudent to start with one product, he chose books—partly because he liked them and also because they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors. And there were more than three million titles in print—far more than a bricks-and-mortar store could possibly keep on display.

When he told David Shaw that he wanted to leave the hedge fund to pursue this idea, Shaw took him on a two-hour walk through Central Park. “You know what, Jeff, this is a really good idea. I think you’re onto a good idea here but this would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced Bezos to think about it for a couple of days before making a decision. Bezos then consulted his wife, MacKenzie, whom he had met at the hedge fund and married the year before. “You know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do,” she said.

To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. “I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

He and MacKenzie flew to Texas, where they borrowed a Chevrolet from Jeff’s father and began a drive that would become legendary in entrepreneurial origin tales. As MacKenzie drove, Jeff typed up a business plan and spreadsheets filled with revenue predictions. “You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”

Bezos picked Seattle as a location for his new company, partly because it was home to Microsoft and many other tech companies and therefore had a lot of engineers to recruit from. It was also near a book distribution company. Bezos wanted to incorporate right away, so on the drive he called a friend to get a recommendation for a lawyer in Seattle. It turned out to be the friend’s divorce lawyer, but he was able to handle the papers. Bezos told the lawyer he wanted to call the new company Cadabra, as in the magical incantation “abracadabra.” The lawyer responded, “Cadaver?” Bezos unleashed his trademark boom of a laugh and realized he would need to come up with a better name. He eventually decided to name what he hoped would be the Earth’s largest store after the Earth’s longest river.

When he called his father to tell him what he was doing, Mike Bezos asked, “What’s the Internet?” Or at least that’s Jeff’s romantic narrative. Mike Bezos in fact had been a user of the early online dial-up services and had a pretty good idea of what online retailing could be. Even though he and Jackie thought it was rash to leave a high-paying financial industry job for such a lark, they took much of their life savings—$100,000 at first, then more—and agreed to invest. “The initial start-up capital came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com,” Bezos says. “That was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do.”

Mike Bezos admitted that he never understood either the concept or the business plan. “He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother,” Jeff says. “I told them that I thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their whole investment.… I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because really, if you look at the odds of a start-up company succeeding at all, it’s only about 10 percent. Here I was, giving myself a 30 percent chance.” As his mother, Jackie, later said, “We didn’t invest in Amazon, we invested in Jeff.” They eventually put in more money, ended up owning 6 percent of the company, and used their wealth to become very active and creative philanthropists focused on providing early-childhood learning opportunities for all children.

Others didn’t quite get the idea either. Craig Stoltz was then a Washington Post reporter running the newspaper’s magazine about consumer technology. Bezos came to pitch his idea. “He was short, with an uncomfortable smile, thinning hair, and a somehow febrile affect,” Stoltz later wrote in a blog post. Totally unimpressed, Stoltz blew him off and declined to write a story about the idea. Years later, long after Stoltz left the paper, Bezos would end up buying it.

Jeff and MacKenzie initially set up the company in the two-bedroom home they rented near Seattle. “They converted the garage into a work space and brought in three Sun workstations,” Josh Quittner later wrote in Time. “Extension cords snaked from every available outlet in the house to the garage, and a black hole gaped through the ceiling—this was where a potbellied stove had been ripped out to make more room. To save money, Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks, at a cost of $60 each.”

Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995. Bezos and his small team rigged up a bell to chime whenever they got a sale, but it very quickly needed to be disabled, as rushes of orders came in. In the first month, with no real marketing or publicity plan other than asking friends to spread the word, Amazon scored sales in all fifty states and in forty-five countries. “Within the first few days, I knew this was going to be huge,” Bezos told Time. “It was obvious that we were onto something much bigger than we ever dared to hope.”

At first Jeff and MacKenzie and a few early employees handled everything, including packing, wrapping, and driving the boxes off to be shipped. “We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all,” Bezos says. “In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.” One of the other iconic origin tales of Amazon, told often by Bezos with his raucous laugh, involved how they figured out a way to make the packing easier.

“This packing is killing me! My back hurts, this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor,” Bezos exclaimed one day. “You know what we need? We need knee pads!”

An employee looked at Bezos as if he were the stupidest person he’d ever seen. “What we need are packing tables,” he said.

Bezos looked at the employee as if he were a genius. “I thought that was the smartest idea I had ever heard,” Bezos recalls. “The next day we got packing tables, and I think we doubled our productivity.”

The fact that Amazon grew so quickly meant that Bezos and his colleagues were unprepared for many of the challenges. But he sees a silver lining in the way they had to hustle. “It formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company,” he says. “Every single person in the company, because we had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well, and that is our goal, to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

Bezos’s goal soon became to create an “everything store.” His next steps were to branch out to music and videos. Keeping his focus on the customer, he emailed one thousand of them to see what else they would like to be able to buy. The answers helped him understand better the concept of “the long tail,” which means being able to offer items that are not everyday bestsellers and, thus, don’t command shelf space at most retailers. “The way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment,” he says. “I remember one of the answers was ‘I wish you sold windshield wiper blades because I really need windshield wiper blades.’ And I thought to myself we can sell anything this way, and then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time.”

At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary.

But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.”

So we went ahead. The great portrait photographer Greg Heisler convinced Bezos to pose with his head facing out from an Amazon box filled with packaging material, and at the house of Margaret Carlson we threw a party featuring only food and drink that had been ordered online. Joshua Cooper Ramo, one of our savviest young editors, wrote the overview story that put Bezos in historical perspective:

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.

Amazon was indeed hit hard by the internet-bubble collapse. Its stock was at $106 a share in December 1999 when our Person of the Year issue came out. A month later it was down 40 percent. Within two years it had fallen to as low as $6 a share. Journalists and stock analysts ridiculed it, dubbing the company “Amazon.toast” and “Amazon.bomb.” In the annual shareholder letter he wrote right after that, Bezos began with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.”

But Don Logan was right. Amazon and Bezos were able to survive the bust. “As I watched the stock fall from 113 to 6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics: number of customers, profit per unit,” he says. “Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast. It’s a fixed-cost business. And so, what I could see is that, from the internal metrics, is that at a certain volume level that we would cover our fixed costs and the company would be profitable.”

Bezos succeeded by keeping his eye on the long game, foregoing profits for growth, and being relentless and sometimes ruthless with competitors and even his own colleagues. At one point during the dot.com meltdown, he and a few other internet entrepreneurs were on an NBC Nightly News special with Tom Brokaw. “Mr. Bezos, can you even spell ‘profit’?” Brokaw asked, highlighting the fact that Amazon was hemorrhaging money as it grew. “Sure,” Bezos replied, “P-R-O-P-H-E-T.” And by 2019 Amazon stock would be at $2,000 a share, and the company would have $233 billion in revenues and 647,000 employees worldwide.

An example of how Bezos innovates and operates was the launch of Amazon Prime, which transformed the way Americans think about how quickly and cheaply they can be gratified by ordering online. One of his board members had been suggesting that Amazon create a loyalty program, similar to what the airlines have with their frequent-flyer programs. Separately, an Amazon engineer suggested that the company offer free shipping to its most loyal customers. Bezos put the two ideas together and asked his finance team to assess the costs and benefits. “The results were horrifying,” Bezos says with his laugh. But Bezos had a rule, which was to use his heart and his intuition as well as empirical data in making a big decision. “There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,” he says. “You do it with a group. You do it with great humility.”

He knew that creating Amazon Prime was what he calls a one-way door: it was a decision difficult to reverse. “We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.” He was aware that it would be scary at first because those who signed up for Prime would be the heaviest users of shipping. “What happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet, who shows up to the buffet first?” he says. “The heavy eaters. It’s scary. It’s, like, oh, my God, did I really say as many prawns as you can eat?” But eventually Amazon Prime led to the combination of a loyalty program and a convenience for customers as well as a huge source of customer data.

The greatest and most serendipitous innovation Bezos made was the creation of Amazon Web Services. The initial ideas—which included a software layer known as Elastic Compute Cloud and a hosting operation known as Simple Storage Service—bubbled up from inside the company. Eventually a variety of related ideas came together in a memo that proposed the creation of a service that would “enable developers and companies to use Web Services to build sophisticated and scalable applications.”

Bezos seized on its potential and, sometimes with great passion erupting into bouts of fury, pushed his team to develop it faster and bigger. The result would supercharge internet entrepreneurship like no other platform since the iPhone App Store. It would enable any kid in a dorm room or any business on any Main Street—or any big corporation, for that matter—to experiment with ideas and build new services without having to buy racks of servers and suites of software. Instead, they could share in a globally distributed infrastructure of server farms, on-demand computing power, and applications that were more extensive than those of any company in the world.

“We completely reinvented the way that companies buy computation,” Bezos says. “Traditionally, if you were a company and needed computation, you would build a data center, and you’d fill that data center with servers, and you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers and keep everything running, and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of price-of-admission, undifferentiated heavy lifting.” Bezos realized that this process was also holding back various groups of innovators within Amazon itself. The company’s applications developers had been in a constant struggle with the hardware teams, but Bezos made them develop some standard application programming interfaces (APIs) and access to computing resources. “As soon as we did that, it was immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this,” he says.

For a while a miracle happened: for a few years no other companies got into the space as competitors. Bezos’s vision was far ahead of everyone else’s. “It was the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business, so far as I know,” he says.

Sometimes a failure and a success go together. That is what happened with the flop of Amazon’s Fire Phone and the success of the Amazon Echo, the company’s smart speaker and home assistant device known as Alexa. “While the Fire Phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers’) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa,” Bezos wrote in his 2017 stockholder letter.

His enthusiasm for Echo grew out of his love of Star Trek. When playing Star Trek games with his friends as a kid, Bezos liked to play the role of the computer on the starship Enterprise. “The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer,” he wrote. “The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud. From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front-row seat to the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.” The result was a wonderful combination of smart speakers, a Star Trek chatty home computer, and an intelligent personal assistant.

The genesis of Amazon Echo was, in one way, like Steve Jobs’s development of Apple iPod. It arose out of intuition rather than focus groups, and it was not in response to some obvious customer demand. “No customer was asking for Echo,” Bezos says. “Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’” In a sweet irony, Bezos was able to trounce Apple in creating such a home device and then make its components—voice recognition and machine learning—work better than competing devices from both Google and, later, Apple.

Eventually Bezos hopes to integrate the Amazon online store, Amazon Prime, Echo, and Amazon’s customer data analytics with the Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which Amazon bought in 2017. Bezos says that his purchase of the company was partly due to his admiration for the outlook of its founder, John Mackey. When he meets with the founder or chief executive of a company that Amazon is thinking of buying, Bezos tries to assess whether he or she is in it merely to make money or because of a true passion for serving customers. “I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.” Mackey struck him as a missionary, and his passion infused the Whole Foods ethos. “It’s a missionary company, and he’s a missionary guy.”

Outside Amazon, Bezos’s greatest enthusiasm, one nurtured since childhood, is space travel. In 2000 he set up a company, very secretively, near Seattle called Blue Origin, naming it after the pale blue planet where humans originated. He called upon one of his favorite science fiction writers, Neal Stephenson, to be an advisor. They kicked around wildly novel ideas, such as using a bullwhip-like device to propel objects into space. Eventually Bezos focused on reusable rockets. “How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960?” he asked. “The engines can be somewhat better, but they’re still chemical rocket engines. What’s different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by those technologies that existed in 2000 that didn’t exist in 1960.”

In March 2003 Bezos began putting together a huge tract of ranchland in Texas where he could build his reusable rockets in secret. One of the great scenes in Christian Davenport’s The Space Barons is the description of the helicopter trip Bezos took to find the land, which ended with a terrifying crash.

When reporter and Bezos biographer Brad Stone discovered the existence of Blue Origin, he emailed Bezos, asking for comment. Bezos wasn’t ready to talk about it, but he did go on the record to push back against Stone’s notion that he had founded the company because he thought that the government-run NASA program had become too risk averse and sluggish. “NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA,” Bezos wrote Stone. “The only reason I’m interested in space is because [NASA] inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five-year-olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.”

Bezos approaches his space endeavors as a missionary rather than a mercenary. “This is the most important work I’m doing, and I have great conviction about that,” he says. Earth is finite, and energy usage has grown so much that it will soon, he thinks, strain the resources of our small planet. That will leave us with a choice: accept static growth for humanity or explore and expand to places beyond Earth. “I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to be using way more energy per capita than I am,” he says. “And I would like to see us not have a population cap. I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system; then there would be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.” But within a century, he fears, the Earth will not be able to sustain this growth of population and energy use. “So, what will that lead to? It will lead to stasis. I don’t even think stasis is compatible with liberty.” That prompted him to believe we should now begin thinking about new frontiers. “We can fix that problem,” he says, by lowering the cost of access to space and using in-space resources.

Blue Origin is focused on lowering the cost of accessing space through its reusable launch vehicles and engines. New Shepard, named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard, was the first rocket to take off vertically, go to space, then land vertically back on Earth—and then it was the first to be reused again. Launching out of West Texas, New Shepard was designed from the beginning for human spaceflight and the rocket is getting ready to fly paying customers to space and back and has been launching research experiments on board for universities, research labs, and NASA. Blue Origin’s larger orbital rocket, New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first person to orbit the Earth, is poised to take commercial, NASA, and national security customers to space. In 2019 Bezos also announced the Blue Moon lunar lander, which was awarded a nearly $500 million contract from NASA to develop a system to take humans back to the moon. Blue Origin has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper on the project. Separately, Bezos funded an expedition that recovered several of the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket to the moon during the Apollo program.

Another personal passion is the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013. In an era when newspapers were declining, he infused the Post with cash, energy, technological skills, and new reporters while allowing its great editor, Martin Baron, unfettered editorial control. “I was not looking for a newspaper,” Bezos says. “It had never occurred to me. It wasn’t like a childhood dream.” But then the paper’s owner, Donald Graham, approached him and, over a series of conversations, convinced him that the mission was important. So Bezos did some soul searching and, as always, relied on intuition as well as analysis. “This is an important institution,” he says he concluded. “This is the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy.” So he told Graham he would buy it, and he didn’t haggle over the price. “I didn’t negotiate with him and I did no due diligence,” he says. “I wouldn’t need to with Don. He told me every wart and pimple and he told me all the things that were great. And every single thing he told me on both sides of that ledger turned out to be true.”

Although Bezos has made the paper better and more financially viable, the purchase has been very costly. Donald Trump neither understood nor cared that Bezos exercised no editorial control and that the paper was completely separate from Amazon. So the president, in ways that seem to me to be corrupt, has abused the power of the federal government to try to punish Amazon and deny contracts to Amazon Web Services that were merited.

Bezos’s own politics and philosophy, which he does not impose on the Post, comprise a mix of social liberalism—he donated to the campaign to legalize gay marriage—and economic views that stress individual liberty. It is an attitude he shares with his father, who fled Castro’s Cuba. “A free market economy, which by necessity involves a lot of liberty, just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources,” he says. But the merit of the free market arises not merely from its efficiency but also from the moral value it accords to individuals, he believes.

Imagine a world where some incredibly artificially intelligent computer could actually do a better job than the invisible hand of allocating resources, and were to say, “There shouldn’t be this many chickens, there should be this many chickens,” just a few more or a few less. Well, that might even lead to more aggregate wealth. So, it might be a society that if you give up liberty, everybody could be a little wealthier. Now, the question that I would pose is, if that turned out to be the world, “Is that a good trade?” Personally, I don’t think so. Personally I think it would be a terrible trade. I think the American Dream is about liberty.

THROUGH THIS BOOK you can learn many of the lessons and secrets revealed in Bezos’s interviews, writings, and the annual shareholder letters he has personally composed since 1997. Here are the five that I think are most important:

1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,” he said in the italicized initial headline in his first shareholder letter in 1997. “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a return on investment, to come into alignment. That’s not always true in the short term.

In addition, long-term thinking permits innovation. “We like to invent and do new things,” he says, “and I know for sure that long-term orientation is essential for invention because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.”

Bezos’s interest in space travel, he says, helps remind him to keep his focus on the distant horizon. Among his many strengths is his ability to keep his eye on that distant horizon, as he has done at Amazon. In the mission statement for his space company, he wrote, “Blue Origin will pursue this long-term objective patiently, step by step.” As Elon Musk pushed his own competing space program forward with very public fits and starts, Bezos advised his team, “Be the tortoise and not the hare.” Blue Origin’s company shield has a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter: “Step by Step, Ferociously.”

Among Bezos’s many strengths is his ability to follow this motto by being exuberantly patient and patiently exuberant. At his Texas ranch Bezos has begun construction of a ten-thousand-year “clock of the long now,” designed by the futurist Danny Hillis, which has a century hand that advances every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every millennium. “It’s a special clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” he says.

2. Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer. As he put it in his 1997 letter, “Obsess over Customers.” Each annual letter reinforces that mantra. “We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company,” he wrote the following year. “We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart.… But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.”

In an interview with me at a conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute and Vanity Fair, Bezos elaborated. “The core of the company is customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession,” he said. “The advantage of being customer focused is that customers are always dissatisfied. They always want more, and so they pull you along. Whereas if you’re competitor obsessed, if you’re a leader, you can look around and you see everybody running behind you, maybe you slow down a little.”

An example of keeping the focus on customers was his policy of allowing negative reviews of products to appear on Amazon. An investor complained that Bezos was forgetting that Amazon only makes money when it sells things, so negative reviews hurt the business. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things,” Bezos says. “We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”

Amazon gets criticized—as does Walmart—for squeezing suppliers and forcing them to cut costs. But Bezos sees “relentlessly lowering prices” for consumers as core to Amazon’s mission. For most recent years Amazon has come in first in major surveys of customer satisfaction.

3. Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations. This is a maxim that Steve Jobs also followed. Bezos’s belief in the power of storytelling means that he thinks that his colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea. “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” he wrote in a recent shareholder letter. “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of study hall.”

The memos, which are limited to six pages, are supposed to be written with clarity, which Bezos believes (correctly) forces a clarity of thinking. They are often collaborative efforts, but they can have a personal style. Sometimes they incorporate proposed press releases. “Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork,” he says. “Someone on the team needs to have the skill.”

4. Focus on the big decisions. “As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?” he asks. “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”

He divides the decisions that have to be made into those that can be walked back and those that are irrevocable. The latter require a lot more caution. In the case of the former, he tries to decentralize the process. At Amazon he created what he calls “multiple paths to yes.” In other organizations, he points out, a proposal can be killed by supervisors at many levels, and it needs to pass through all those gates in order to be approved. At Amazon, employees can shop their ideas around to any of the hundreds of executives who are empowered to get to yes.

5. Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.”

There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?

It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.”

These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live.

Bezos has done all of this. But he still has many chapters to write in his story. He has always been public spirited, but I suspect in the coming years he will do more with philanthropy. Just as Bill Gates’s parents led him into such endeavors, Jackie and Mike Bezos have been models for Bezos as he focuses on missions such as providing great early-childhood education to all kids.

I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”

FOR ALL THE YEARS of building Amazon to its formidable global role, Bezos could not have anticipated the cascade of crises in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic created an immediate spike in demand for e-commerce deliveries as people were encouraged to stay home, and Amazon faced the daunting challenge of keeping its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers safe. Bezos said his time and thinking were “wholly focused on COVID-19 and on how Amazon can best play its role.” The New York Times reported that he was holding daily calls to help make decisions about issues such as inventory and virus testing, a marked change from recent years when Bezos had shifted day-to-day responsibilities to senior executives as he focused on long-term projects. And then there was the congressional pressure on the tech industry. On July 29, Bezos testified to a House hearing along with the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Apple. In his testimony, Bezos framed the challenges the nation faced: “We’re in the middle of a much-needed race reckoning. We also face the challenges of climate change and income inequality, and we’re stumbling through the crisis of a global pandemic.” And then he shifted his tone to the positivity of an entrepreneur. “Still, with all of our faults and problems, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US … It’s still Day One for this country.”