Bezos enforced strict frugality in Amazon’s daily operations; he made employees pay for parking and required all executives to fly coach. But he was surprisingly profligate in some ways. In early 1998, when he hired Randy Tinsley from Intel to become director of corporate development, one of the first things he said to him was “I am really looking forward to going shopping with you.” Their resulting splurge was epic. Amazon bought the movie database IMDB.com, the British Web bookstore BookPages, the German Web bookstore Telebuch, the online marketplace Exchange.com, the pioneering
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