Is Jeff Bezos our age’s model entrepreneur, whose unwavering customer focus made Amazon so essential to the world’s locked-down middle classes that it could thrive even in a pandemic? Or is he the billionaire villain who epitomises the tax-skirting and people-squeezing kind of capitalism that has gone sour, as the crisis has focused attention on the costs of the convenience Amazon epitomises?
His fans and foes will never agree, but one thing is clear to both: Amazon’s growth, from selling its first book in 1995 to joining the elite club of trillion-dollar companies, is one of our era’s most compelling business stories.
Remarkably few have so far told that tale well at book length. Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a winner of the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, still stands out among them. But it was published in 2013, when Amazon was worth just $150bn. In this book, Brian Dumaine sets out to capture all that the now $1.2tn company has since become, and to illuminate what he calls “the business model of the 21st century”.