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LEADERS: The genius of Amazon

The pandemic has shown that

Amazon is essential—
but vulnerable

Jeff Bezos’s vision of a world shopping online is coming true
faster than ever. But the job of running Amazon hasn’t got
any easier

jun 20th 2020 edition

IN THE SUMMER of 1995 Jeff Bezos was a skinny obses- 1st paragraph
sive working in a basement alongside his wife, packing pa-
perbacks into boxes. Today, 25 years on, he is perhaps the
21st century’s most important tycoon: a muscle-ripped
divorcé who finances space missions and newspapers for
fun, and who receives adulation from Warren Buffett
and abuse from Donald Trump. Amazon, his firm, is no
longer just a bookseller but a digital conglomerate worth
$1.3trn that consumers love, politicians love to hate, and
investors and rivals have learned never to bet against.
Now the pandemic has fuelled a digital surge that shows
how important Amazon is to ordinary life in America
and Europe, because of its crucial role in e-commerce,
logistics and cloud computing (see article). In response to
the crisis, Mr Bezos has put aside his side-hustles and re-
turned to day-to-day management. Superficially it could
not be a better time, but the world’s fourth-most-valua-
ble firm faces problems: a fraying social contract, financial
bloating and re-energised competition.

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