Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

None of those bets had yet borne fruit. But in 2015, an earlier wager finally started to pay off. In its April earnings report, Amazon revealed for the first time the financial health of its ten-year-old cloud business, Amazon Web Services, and shocked Wall Street with its underlying sales growth and profitability. Then in June, Amazon copied a competitor in China and introduced the first Prime Day, capitalizing on a decade of growth from its two-day shipping program. Both Wall Street and the media began to show a newfound interest in Amazon, and shortly after the twentieth anniversary of its launch, the company came under a new kind of scrutiny commensurate with its growing size. That August, an explosive newspaper article in the New York Times turned Amazon’s combative corporate culture into the subject of national attention. Over the course of that eventful year, 2015, Amazon stock more than doubled. Because he owned about 18 percent of the company, Bezos was vaulted into the ranks of the top five wealthiest people in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index. It turned out that Steve Ballmer’s broadside against Amazon was a perfect contrarian indicator; it would mark almost precisely the start of one of the most dramatic increases in corporate value and personal wealth in the entire history of capitalism.