Man of the Year: Jeff
Bezos
Reuters
3:00 a.m. 20.Dec.1999 PST
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the young
entrepreneur whose vision of a giant Internet bookstore helped
pioneer the global online shopping revolution, was named on
Sunday as Time magazine's Man of the Year.
"Bezos is a person who not only changed
the way we do things but helped pave the way for the
future," said Time managing editor Walter Isaacson,
explaining the magazine's choice.
"E-commerce has been around for four or
five years ... but 1999 was a time in which e-commerce and
dotcom mania reached a peak and really affected all of
us," he said.
The magazine will announce a separate Person
of the Century next week.
"This is an incredible and humbling
honor," said 35-year-old Bezos. 'The Internet holds the
promise to improve lives and empower people. I feel very lucky
to be involved in this time of rapid and amazing change."
Bezos began Amazon.com in July 1995 out of a
two-bedroom rented home in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue with
an initial investment of US$300,000, a garage converted into a
warehouse/workspace, three Sun workstations and 300
'customers" beta-testing the Web site.
Four years later, the company has a total of
13.1 million customers and is at the forefront of online
retailing, which is expected to attract $8 billion worth of
sales this year, up from $3 billion in 1998.
Despite the explosive growth, Bezos has had
to contend with frequent Wall Street criticism of his
ambitious expansion plans for Amazon.com and doubts about
when, or whether, it will ever turn a profit.
'The fact that Amazon.com hasn't turned a
profit and may be a bubble is part of the news and part of the
story," Isaacson told Reuters. "He's a symbol of
dotcom companies that don't turn a profit but have high market
valuations."
Amazon.com went public in 1997 at $18 a
share. As of the close of trading on Friday, the stock, which
has split three times, was worth $94 a share.
Bezos is the fourth youngest person to be
named Time's Man of the Year since the magazine began the
tradition in 1927 with aviator Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh
was 25 at the time, while Queen Elizabeth II made the list in
1952 at age 26, and Martin Luther King in 1963 at age 34.
