Amacon.com? Freudian slip <g>:
Sunday December 19, 6:00 am Eastern Time
Amacon.com founder Bezos is Time's Man of the Year
NEW YORK, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the young American entrepeneur whose vision of a giant Internet bookstore helped pioneer the global on-line 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 $300,000, a garage converted into a warehouse/workspace, three Sun workstations and 300 ''customers'' beta-testing the website.
Four years later, the company has a total of 13.1 million customers and is at the forefront of on-line 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. Lindberg 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. |
