Bill Bonner on the rise and fall of Amazon.com (2003)

[Jeff Bezos] was 35 when Time magazine awarded him its "Person of the Year" title in January 2001.  When the going was good, Time gushed, "Jeffrey Preston Bezos... peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him... Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do," rattled Time, "vibrations so strong they demand action - actions that can seem rash, even stupid."  Well, yes.  Very stupid.

[...]

Some people get rich in a revolution.  Some people get killed.  By October 2001, it was becoming clear who would be the victims - those who believed in Amazon.com and the Information Revolution.

Bezos was of course one of the victims.  In 2001, he was awarded the "Fame is Fleeting Award," by Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times, "for one of the fastest falls from grace in recent history."  She considered it sadly ironic that he was facing irate shareholders only a year after being honored as Time's Person of the Year.

For at the end of 2000, Amazon's stock prices showed a decline of 89 percent to the $7 to $10 range (from its December 1999 high of $113).  Thus, a pin had pierced the bubble in high technology, and those who "got it" were getting it good and hard.  Their day of reckoning had come.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day, pp. 23-24