Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
Brad Stone
Simon & Schuster (May 2021)

What would Aeschylus think?

If Amazon and its founder were viewed as bound volumes, Brad Stone would probably be the best person to “unbind” them; that is, to help others understand how their truly unique relationship was established in 1994, and how they have since functioned in tandem.

Presumably the other reviews of this book have (collectively) suggested what most people need to know in order to decide whether or not to read Amazon Unbound. Stone seems to have provided all the information and insights they need to understand the process by which an insight became an online book store that eventually became an “everything store,” one that is now without doubt a “global empire.”

These are among the subjects Stone discusses that are of greatest interest and value to me:

o The impact of Jeff Bezos’ childhood experiences (e.g. summers with his grandparents in Texas)
o His defining characteristics that best explain what he has accomplished during the last 27 years (notably the fulfillment centers, AWS, and the Kindle)
o What it would be like to be a member of Amazon’s S-Team in recent years
o What infuriates Bezos
o What delights him
o The evolution of the Amazon business model in recent years
o Why Bezos purchased the Washington Post and what his impact has been since then
o His most significant — albeit rare — errors of judgment and what they reveal about him
o Heraclitus on Bezos: “Everything changes, nothing changes.”
o The greatest challenges that Andy Jassy will face when he succeeds Bezos

Here are Brad Stone’s concluding thoughts: “Long ago we stepped through a one-way door and into the technological society conceived of and built in large part by Jeff Bezos and his colleagues. Whatever you think about the company — and the man — that controls so much of our economic reality in the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is no turning back now.”

Nor, I suspect, has there been a turning back point since Bezos launched Amazon in the enclosed garage of a three-bedroom ranch house in an eastern Seattle suburb. “He called the company Calabra Inc., then wavered and considered the names Bookmall.com, AARD.com, and Relentless.com, before finally deducing that the Earth’s largest river could represent its biggest selection of books — Amazon.com.”

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Stone’s earlier book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) as well as recently published Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson (2020).