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Watch this profile of Jeff Bezos in 1999

  
Analysis, Education, Video
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Everyone was right

This is a great preview of Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos in 1999. It captures the skepticism about the company and the huge losses it was sustaining as it tried to stake its place as the world’s online bookstore. That eventually expanded into the world’s store for everything.

The company was only 5 years old at the time and it was the height of the tech boom. Shares of AMZN were trading at $150. The would fall to $10 two years later and it would take more than 12 years to regain the lofty heights of the dot-com boom.

But you can see from the start that Bezos had a vision (and a hearty laugh). On Friday, he became the world’s only person worth $100 billion but when you consider that he was worth $10 billion when this was shot, it somehow seems less impressive. After all, it’s only a 13.7% annualized return.

What’s also fascinating was that just about everyone was right, to some extent. Of course, Bezos was right about the future, but the critics of the stock price and valuations were also right. Or at least they were for a long time. And the analyst who warned that Wal-Mart should wake up was definitely right.

Stephen Hawking: Humanity Won’t Survive Another 1000 Years on Earth

  
Analysis, Education, Video
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 Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says that humanity won’t make it through the next 1,000 years unless we find a way to leave Earth.

 “We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” Mr. Hawking told an audience at the Sydney Opera House, where he appeared virtually, in holographic form. “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”

Hawking was filmed in his office at the University of Cambridge, in the UK, and the footage was sent via San Jose for processing then on to Australia to create his image on stage.

“He’s worried about the future of the human race. You know, he thinks that human beings are, I suppose naturally aggressive,” said Professor John Webb, the director of the lecture series at the University of New South Wales that made Hawkings talk possible.

“That may have been useful at some point in the early history of humanity enabling us to find food and get a partner and things like that, but he thinks that aggression that remains with us today is now the thing that could well end up destroying us.”

“I think he’s put a time on it to make us realise we’ve got to take better control of what we’re doing.”

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