Morgan Housel, writing for The Motley Fool:
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN ) was once the poster child of what happens when excitement about a company detaches from reality. The headlines “Amazon founder named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year,” and “Analysts Fear Amazon Is Going Bankrupt” appeared within 14 months of each other around the year 2000. Short of fraud, there little precedent for this in business history.
But 13 years later, Amazon is thriving. It is dominating, in fact, including in lines of business having little to do with its original undertaking of selling books. Shares now trade for three times what they did at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
Thank Amazon’s quirky CEO, Jeff Bezos, for this success. He created a culture that’s not only different from, but often totally at odds with, how most business leaders think. He’s also quite quotable. Here are 20 smart things Bezos has said over the years.