Ah, the "myth" of Jeff Bezos. I only "met" him twice, in the hallways of PacMed, back when Amazon's workforce was so tiny compared to now.<p>I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc.<p>Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to shout their anger at the company (because my public facing role of tech evangelist, and my @simon Twitter handle).<p>I have to say, I don't think that Amazon's and Jeff's success has much to do with a "?" email, or the ":)" email I saw a few times. These are simply a shortcut for slightly longer sentences - "what do you say about this?", and "Nice work! :)".<p>Jeff's success, in my view, is an amazing capacity to hire excellent people, and being able to drive them to work crazy hours and feel like founders, despite not having share ownership in accordance to their work. Most of them, especially the early ones, are rich beyond any imagination. They could have been richer, sure... But they could also not.<p>Also, the organizational structure at Amazon, with every team having to provide APIs for their product, is also genius. AWS could have not happened without that.