Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

Written by Brad Stone

Narrated by Pete Larkin

This New York Times bestseller is a “masterful” (The Washington Post), “juicy tour of the company [Jeff] Bezos built” (The New York Times Book Review), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store.

Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. It’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.

In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents an “excellent” (The New York Times), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.

Definitive, timely, and “engaging” (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797129846

Brad Stone

Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which has been translated into over thirty-five languages, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Reviews for Amazon Unbound

[Alexandra Kan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A sequel to the Everything store has a different vibe but still a very good read, for everyone complaining that it’s not a biography, please read the first book that focuses more on Jeff’s upbringing and early life events. Loved the honesty and failures, somehow it made Bezos more human watching him not succeed at everything at first immediately, but trying different approaches and adjusting, changing.

[Nguyên Lê · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Only focus about Bezos company but not so much about his biography as well as how he grew up

[Matthew Gibb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A window into the mind of a dreamer with many hair brained ideas and a few of them have panned out to place him as the king of the corporate world. This is the sequal to an older book, The Everything Store, which was about the origin of Amazon. This is more of a current chronology that starts in 2010 with Alexa and what went into creating a cloud based voice activated computer. Otherwise known as the Pringle's can, The Amazon Echo was a hit and it was overseen by an Indian engineer. It culminates with the anti trust lawsuit and the pandemic response, which was botu robust and controvertial.

[Brigitte Dreger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an important book to read for anyone interested in economics, climate change, and labor politics. As an entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos is a legend. The legacy left behind with Amazon is questionable; this book won’t help you to draw conclusions over whether that is positive or negative. However, I found this book illuminating, inspiring, and disheartening all at once.

[Andre Phillips · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. I think it gives a deeper understanding of the why of Bezos

[allison · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Pure trash. Sensationalized drama about the employees and the scandals of Amazon instead of talking about the man behind the company himself. This is typical journalistic propaganda and not a biography of Bezos.