A charismatic founder with near-obsessive conviction, a business that bleeds money, and a stock price based on a wildly optimistic valuation.
In 1997, Jeff Bezos took Amazon public at a price of $18 per share at a $438 million valuation. The online bookseller’s stock would then crater 90% after the dot-com bubble burst, before flourishing into a $2.6 trillion conglomerate that raked in $77.7 billion last year.
