To observe if not exactly to celebrate the June breaching by Amazon common stock of the $1,000-per-share mark – not to mention the company’s gobsmacking bid for Whole Foods – one offers the best book so far on the Amazon phenomenon and the enigmatic genius at its helm. Not to mention the only book. 

The tome in question is The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by journalist Brad Stone, who is currently senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg News. It was published in October 2013, and although updated in later editions, a lot has gone on more recently. But this is still the only serious book-length treatment of the subject. In addition to meticulous reporting, it benefits from the fact that Mr. Bezos encouraged friends, family and executives to cooperate with Mr. Stone – though he himself did not.

What emerges is the story of one of the defining entrepreneurial innovations of the Internet age, and of the deeply – one almost wishes to say transcendently – weird dude who gave birth to it.

Mr. Bezos had what to outward appearances was an ordinary childhood with his mother and stepfather – a plot which is thickened by the fact that his mother had cast his real father (a onetime circus performer) out of their lives when the boy was four. (Mr. Stone tracked down said father, and was astonished to discover that he had no idea who his son had become.) The parallels here with Steve Jobs – who seems to have been importantly affected psychologically by the discovery that he was adopted – are entirely too tempting.

Mr. Bezos famously took his crib apart with a screwdriver when he was three, because he insisted on sleeping on a bed, and in some sense has never looked back. To say that he is a man of many contradictions – the full panoply of which is on vivid display in this scrupulously fair book – would be an understatement.

In a related stab at fairness: it is entirely possible that the little squib you are reading is unreasonably tainted by being the work of a person who is (a) old, (b) seriously technophobic, and (c) convinced, based upon some fifty years as an equity investor, that trees do not grow all the way to the sky. To the last of these points, I note with some asperity that the stock of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., which the last time I looked was still a far larger retailer, is selling for about 16.5 times its next full year’s (very slowly growing) earnings, and that Amazon is selling at 86 times its (very rapidly growing) 2018 earnings estimate.

But I digress. The Everything Store is a fascinating book by a first-rate reporter about a totally transformative company founded and managed by a genuine visionary, and every financial advisor will benefit from reading it. 

© 2017 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in his monthly newsletter. His most recent book is Around the Year with Nick Murray.