Amazon sold books when Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994. It now sells nearly everything, moves the parcels itself, runs a large share of the internet's computing, and owns a newspaper. His annual shareholder letters became required reading for anyone trying to understand how long-term strategy is actually written down.

Two convictions built it. Obsess over the customer, and give up profit today to hold the position tomorrow. The most valuable thing that mindset produced was almost an accident of internal need: Amazon Web Services, a cloud business that quietly became the company's profit engine and the backbone of much of the web.

Everything at Amazon started with a question most executives avoid: what will still be true in ten years?

He handed over the CEO job in 2021. Blue Origin took his attention — a slow, expensive bet on eventually moving heavy industry off the planet — alongside The Washington Post and a personal investment and philanthropy operation.

The management vocabulary he left behind is everywhere now. Two-pizza teams. Day 1. Executives who have never worked at Amazon still quote it in meetings. What remains untested is whether the same patience pays off in space the way it did in retail, and that answer will take decades.

Before Amazon, Bezos studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton and worked on Wall Street, rising to senior vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He left in 1994, moved to Seattle and started the company in a garage, choosing books because no physical shop could stock a catalogue that large.

Amazon went public in 1997, and that year's shareholder letter set out the principle he repeated for two decades: decisions would favour long-term market leadership over short-term profit. The company survived the dot-com crash, introduced Prime in 2005, launched AWS in 2006 and the Kindle in 2007. Each looked like a distraction from retail at the time, and each became a business in its own right.

Blue Origin, founded in 2000, flew its New Shepard capsule with Bezos on board in July 2021, weeks after he stepped down as Amazon's chief executive. He bought The Washington Post personally in 2013 for 250 million dollars, and in 2020 committed ten billion dollars to the Bezos Earth Fund for climate and nature work.