The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

For coffee breaks and meetings, the employees would go to a nearby Barnes & Noble, an irony that Bezos later mentioned often in speeches and interviews.

“This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,”

Most memorably, he purchased the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone, for $40,000.

Borders, like Circuit City, couldn’t cut costs fast enough because it was locked into fifteen- or twenty-year leases on its stores. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, half its stores were still highly profitable, according to its CEO, but the company couldn’t raise money to buy out the leases on its bad locations.

Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.