Farewell, Jeff Bezos

In October 1994, a husband-and-wife startup in Washington state hired its first employee, a computer programmer called Shel Kaphan. Kaphan wasn’t sure about the startup’s business model—selling books on the “world wide web”—or its name, Cadabra, which sounded a bit too much like “cadaver.” But the man who hired Kaphan, Jeff Bezos, soon came up with a new name that hinted at the company’s ambitions: Amazon.com. “It’s not only the largest river in the world,” Bezos explained, “it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away.”

Kaphan, whom Bezos has called “the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com,” has emerged in recent years as a slightly anguished critic of a company he did much to build. Speaking to last year’s excellent PBS documentary Amazon Empire, Kaphan characterised Amazon as “a ruthless competitor.”

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