Bezos made a company who is really good at scaling to any scale at all functions. He created a ton of process at Amazon to facilitate this. I spent a number of years there as a senior leader. I was profoundly impressed with how his influence is pervasive in how things are done, and they’re generally insightful and work well for operating a highly scaled distributed organization that can try many risky things, fail fast, and succeed fast. He didn’t do it alone, but he did create the environment for it to happen and held pretty tight control over the tenants and way things are done. There are many humanistic ways in which Amazon is a profound failure but I think it’s naive to underestimate how much direct and indirect influence bezos had on what Amazon has achieved and become. I think if Bezos had applied some energy to creating an environment that fosters the humanity of its people it would be a much better company in most respects, but it’s undeniable to my experience that one man did instigate the changes we’ve seen Amazon bring to our world.

(N.b., I don’t say these things out of some worship for Bezos or Amazon, you can respect and appreciate something without liking it)