In 1999, the time person of the year, was a then 35 year old entrepreneur who founded which company?

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the young entrepreneur whose vision of a giant Internet bookstore helped pioneer the global online shopping revolution, was named on Sunday as Time magazine's Man of the Year. "Bezos is a person who not only changed the way we do things but helped pave the way for the future," said Time […] Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the young entrepreneur whose vision of a giant Internet bookstore helped pioneer the global online shopping revolution, was named on Sunday as Time magazine's Man of the Year. "Bezos is a person who not only changed the way we do things but helped pave the way for the future," said Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, explaining the magazine's choice. "E-commerce has been around for four or five years ... but 1999 was a time in which e-commerce and dotcom mania reached a peak and really affected all of us," he said. Four years later, the company has a total of 13.1 million customers and is at the forefront of online retailing, which is expected to attract $8 billion worth of sales this year, up from $3 billion in 1998. Despite the explosive growth, Bezos has had to contend with frequent Wall Street criticism of his ambitious expansion plans for Amazon.com and doubts about when, or whether, it will ever turn a profit. 'The fact that Amazon.com hasn't turned a profit and may be a bubble is part of the news and part of the story," Isaacson told Reuters. "He's a symbol of dotcom companies that don't turn a profit but have high m...

When did Person of the Year start? Though the issue has become a signature feature for TIME, it What does it mean to be Person of the Year? The title goes to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse,” as former Managing Editor Even within the newsroom, very few people know who the Person of the Year will be. The announcement is made publicly before the issue goes to the printers, to make sure no leaks ruin the surprise. What’s the deal with the reader’s choice poll? While TIME’s editors make the final decision about who is the Person of the Year, the magazine also invites readers to weigh in on who they think has earned the title. The online poll is a valuable way to see who the Internet thinks has most affected their lives. In early years, before the Internet, readers were invited to Is it always an actual person? Sometimes, TIME has chosen to highlight the influence of an object (like the Has TIME’s Person of the Year ever been someone who is dead? Generally, TIME’s editors have selected a living person as Person of the Year, but that’s a tradition and not a rule. Over the years, especially when notable deaths have left the world shaken, TIME readers have argued that the tradition ought to be broken. At the end of 1963, just weeks after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, a reader More Must-Reads From TIME • • Why Job Hunting Is Getting Wo...

Follow He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed. Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity ("I still can't see how he thought of it," said the late Richard Feynman, no slouch himself). But the great physicist was also engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for mothy sweaters and sweatshirts. He tossed off pithy aphorisms ("Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it") and playful doggerel as easily as equations. Viewing the hoopla over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model. He was a cartoonist's dream come true. Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to poetry. At first even many scientists didn't really grasp relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack (asked if it was true that only three people understood relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, then said, "I am trying to think who the third person is"). To the w...