| In an early video interview with Jeff Bezos just three years after he founded Amazon, the then-33-year-old e-commerce pioneer, squinting into the sun and cocking his head on his long neck like a confused emu, overflowed with excitement about the possibilities offered by the growing internet. “The late 20th century is just a great time to be” — here he paused, awkwardly pursing his lips and nodding his head, like his brain was moving faster than his pale flesh could follow — “alive!” “I think a millennium from now,” he continued, doubling down, “people are going to look back and say, ‘Wow, the late 20th century was really a great time to be alive on this planet.’” He’s certainly right there. The 1990s were a great time for American prosperity, for culture, for technology and for the nerds who made the latter possible. I’m not using “nerd” as a pejorative here; Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994 as an online book retailer, proudly told 60 Minutes in 1999 that he was a “nerdy” kid. Then he added, laughing, “That hasn’t changed!” A quarter century after that interview, Bezos, who is now the second wealthiest person on the planet, seems to have flipped his outlook completely. No longer is he the balding string-bean billionaire in a frugal Honda Accord; instead, he’s the yoked tech titan in a $500 million yacht. Instead of focusing on long-view regret minimization, he’s seizing each rose-colored day as it comes. Instead of owning the title of nerd, this year he became the archetypal opposite: a bully. | 