Amazon.com is one of the biggest and most admired E-commerce startups. Lionized by Wall Street and considered an ideal model for other E-tailers, the company has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism among industry analysts and investors for its inability to yet turn a profit for investors despite annual sales totaling more than $1 billion annually. Company founder Jeffrey Bezos has been deified for the success of Amazon.com and its innovative and revolutionary business model. Such deification and Wall Street support has driven market shares of Amazon.com to higher levels than its main rival, Barnes & Noble (B&N), even though B&N posts strong returns each quarter and has more economic muscle than Amazon.com.
The corporate culture views Bezos with a similar level of admiration, a culture whose mood, tone, and success stem from the energetic Internet maverick. As one employee notes “The vision thing isn’t all he has brought to Amazon. His energy-he runs up and down the company’s three flights of stairs-provides much of the place’s electricity” (Hof 119). Jeffrey Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964, to a Cuban refugee father and a mother who worked as a banker (Hof 119). Bezos learned a lot about revolution and business from his father, who emigrated here in 1960, and who works as an Exxon Corp. executive to this day. Bezos wanted to be an astronaut as a child, but he quickly displayed his entrepreneurial talent early. He learned to love science from visiting his grandfather in Houston in the summers, a retiree from the Atomic Energy Commission. Teachers remember him as having such focus that they would often have to physically move him from his chair to move to another task.
While in high school Bezos developed a program for summer-school called the DREAM Institute, where young people would come to be encouraged to think creatively “He even charged his brother and sister t...