Walter Frick, executive editor, membershipįrom Amazon’s humble beginnings in 1995 as an online bookstore, Jeff Bezos has built an empire that is valued over $1.6 trillion today. Whatever he does next, he will be judged in large part by what he did in the role he is about to vacate. Likewise, Bezos’s legacy is tied up in the organization he created in Amazon. Their answers, included below, capture the complexity of one of the most influential CEOs of our era, and they offer a guide for aspiring leaders who hope to learn from his success without necessarily following in his footsteps.Īs a kid, Bezos admired Thomas Edison, and two of our respondents drew the comparison-journalist Brad Stone, who has written two books on Bezos, called him “the Thomas Edison of the internet era.” Edison’s greatest achievement was arguably the lab he created at Menlo Park, New Jersey, which redefined the process of invention itself.

We asked 11 thoughtful experts from business, academia, labor, and policy to assess Jeff Bezos’s legacy. Should we remember him as a customer-obsessed founder? A long-term thinker and an internet visionary? A 21st century robber baron? A union buster? Is he an enabler of small businesses or their archenemy? What should we make of his role as the owner of The Washington Post or his commitment to furthering space travel? That drop points to the difficulty of assessing Bezos’s legacy, at least so far.

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