Mr. Bezos, 41, is a slight man with thinning brown hair and large hazel eyes that seem to swell even larger when he's excited, which is often. His leg bobbed sporadically through a 45-minute interview last week in Aspen, Colo., where he was speaking at the Ideas Festival of the Aspen Institute.He owns roughly one-fourth of Amazon - giving him a net worth of about $3.5 billion - but by all accounts, and by all appearances, he is strikingly down to earth. He seems relentlessly upbeat and appears not to waver in his belief that Wall Street is largely one huge distraction. If you give customers what they want, he said repeatedly, the rest will take care of itself.
"Our stock was doing all sorts of gyrations, and of course it wasn't just our stock, as you may recall," he said when asked if the board had ever expressed displeasure with the job he was doing. Amazon routinely fell short of Wall Street's expectations, as it has done in three of the last four quarters, but revenue continued to grow as its stock was plummeting. (Amazon now has a succession plan in place, he noted.) "The people who were focused on the company," he said, "understood that the business fundamentals were improving year over year."
Besides, Mr. Bezos added, he is a bargain at his current annual salary of $81,000. "And I don't take any stock options," he said. And with that he let loose a rip-roaring laugh.
Mr. Bezos has every right to laugh. He proved wrong legions of critics who had predicted Amazon's demise, just as he defied those who had declared that Amazon would never turn a profit. Satisfaction surveys show that Amazon enjoys a golden reputation among most of its 49 million active customers, and last year it booked $588 million in profit on $6.9 billion in revenue.
Yet Amazon is still a long way from its larger ambitions of dominating electronic commerce the way Wal-Mart dominates the in-store retail market. It could be said that the dot-com era began 10 years ago, when Amazon made its Internet debut, but the company has been eclipsed by eBay, which in recent years has allowed merchants to forgo auctions and set up storefronts on its virtual worldwide mall.
Forrester Research estimates that consumers will spend 22 percent more money online this year than they did in 2004. Yet its research shows eBay's market share growing at roughly twice the pace of the overall market, while Amazon is growing at half the overall pace, said Carrie Johnson, a Forrester analyst. Today, eBay has a market value three times that of Amazon.
Then there is the competition on other fronts, as consumers become more comfortable stepping outside Amazon's cozy confines. Increasingly, price-comparison services and bargain sites like Overstock.com - not to mention the Web fronts set up by the very brick-and-mortar giants that Amazon was supposed to put out of business - are putting pressure on Amazon's bottom line.
Several years ago, Amazon, along with eBay and Yahoo, were the Internet "it" stocks owned by most mutual funds focused on publicly traded growth companies. Today, eBay and Yahoo - and Google, but not Amazon - reign as the portfolio standard-bearers.
"This used to be the most controversial Internet stock," Mark S. Mahaney, a financial analyst at Citigroup Smith Barney, said of Amazon. "It now seems about the least-paid-attention-to."
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