Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
This New York Times bestseller is a “masterful” (The Washington Post), “juicy tour of the company [Jeff] Bezos built” (The New York Times Book Review), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store.
Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. It’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.
In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents an “excellent” (The New York Times), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.
Definitive, timely, and “engaging” (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.
Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. It’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.
In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents an “excellent” (The New York Times), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.
Definitive, timely, and “engaging” (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.
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Community Reviews
It's a compelling book.
Stone writes a logical sequel to his previous book, The Everything Store. The first one focused on how Amazon became the dominant retail platform in the US. The second focuses on how Amazon/Bezos expanded into leadership positions in a host of industries and geographies from online advertising to truckload logistics and final mile delivery to film and television to data centers and cloud services to hardware and home security.
He ends the book by wondering aloud whether Amazon has made the world a better place, on balance. Then retracts the question and surmises that it's impossible to imagine comparing a world with Amazon to one without it, since it's impossible to imagine what a world without Amazon might look like. Is that true? I think it's actually an important question. Much of Stone's narrative concerns the question of what alchemy of brutal determination and quirky tech-enabled devotion to progress animated the people who ultimately made Amazon work, Bezos chief among them.
Were Amazon an inevitable consequence of the tech revolution, like the Railroad and Steel Magnates, many of these stories would seem less interesting. It seems to me that Stone does little to convince a reader that anything other than AWS and Amazon Fulfillment (which enabled next day shipping) are truly unique, because Amazon built hyper-scale versions of solutions that only it could consume. That doesn't make Stone's book less interesting, but I think it is an argument that he should have focused on these truly special elements rather than taking a broader approach: Amazon India, China, and Fire Phone felt somewhat out of place; Alexa interesting, but undercooked - perhaps because we're still waiting to see what the impact of that particularly technology winds up being.
Anyhow, I found Stone's stories well researched and thoughtful.
As to Bezos himself... I happened to be reading Faust at the same time that I read this book and - let me tell you - it was hard not to see the parallels. In some ways, Bezos only makes sense when I read Faust, specifically referring to Bezos's final indiscretion, divorce and mid-life crisis inspired turn. Without Faust, I thought of this as as a bizarre lapse in focus from an otherwise ambitious entrepreneur. With Faust, I see it as another grasp at the eternal from a desperate man that has not acknowledged the limits of his own mortality. For Bezos, life with Sanchez is not an affair, it is an attempt to recast his life as best in yet another dimension, that of fame and social status, in addition to the technology, business, and venture areas that he already dominates and that have only left him striving for more...
A meditation on Corporate Power in the 21st century, where it comes from, how it behaves, what it wants out of life. All the more impressive because Stone has no direct access to the Big Kahuna himself.
Four stars!
Stone writes a logical sequel to his previous book, The Everything Store. The first one focused on how Amazon became the dominant retail platform in the US. The second focuses on how Amazon/Bezos expanded into leadership positions in a host of industries and geographies from online advertising to truckload logistics and final mile delivery to film and television to data centers and cloud services to hardware and home security.
He ends the book by wondering aloud whether Amazon has made the world a better place, on balance. Then retracts the question and surmises that it's impossible to imagine comparing a world with Amazon to one without it, since it's impossible to imagine what a world without Amazon might look like. Is that true? I think it's actually an important question. Much of Stone's narrative concerns the question of what alchemy of brutal determination and quirky tech-enabled devotion to progress animated the people who ultimately made Amazon work, Bezos chief among them.
Were Amazon an inevitable consequence of the tech revolution, like the Railroad and Steel Magnates, many of these stories would seem less interesting. It seems to me that Stone does little to convince a reader that anything other than AWS and Amazon Fulfillment (which enabled next day shipping) are truly unique, because Amazon built hyper-scale versions of solutions that only it could consume. That doesn't make Stone's book less interesting, but I think it is an argument that he should have focused on these truly special elements rather than taking a broader approach: Amazon India, China, and Fire Phone felt somewhat out of place; Alexa interesting, but undercooked - perhaps because we're still waiting to see what the impact of that particularly technology winds up being.
Anyhow, I found Stone's stories well researched and thoughtful.
As to Bezos himself... I happened to be reading Faust at the same time that I read this book and - let me tell you - it was hard not to see the parallels. In some ways, Bezos only makes sense when I read Faust, specifically referring to Bezos's final indiscretion, divorce and mid-life crisis inspired turn. Without Faust, I thought of this as as a bizarre lapse in focus from an otherwise ambitious entrepreneur. With Faust, I see it as another grasp at the eternal from a desperate man that has not acknowledged the limits of his own mortality. For Bezos, life with Sanchez is not an affair, it is an attempt to recast his life as best in yet another dimension, that of fame and social status, in addition to the technology, business, and venture areas that he already dominates and that have only left him striving for more...
A meditation on Corporate Power in the 21st century, where it comes from, how it behaves, what it wants out of life. All the more impressive because Stone has no direct access to the Big Kahuna himself.
Four stars!
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