Newsweek On Air: ‘Books via the Internet’
The earliest known broadcast interview with Bezos: a segment on buying books over the internet in Newsweek’s weekly radio magazine, recorded less than a year after Amazon.com opened. He is billed simply as ‘founder, Amazon.com’.
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All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →
- 1996
Newsweek On Air: ‘Books via the Internet’
The earliest known broadcast interview with Bezos: a segment on buying books over the internet in Newsweek’s weekly radio magazine, recorded less than a year after Amazon.com opened. He is billed simply as ‘founder, Amazon.com’.
- 1996
Computer Chronicles: ‘Online Shopping’
A 1996 episode of the long-running PBS technology show surveys early e-commerce sites — Amazon, Onsale, CyberCash, NetRadio, VeriSign and Cybergold — with a young Bezos among the guests, walking through how Amazon.com works. It is among the earliest video of Bezos on television.
- 1997
‘This is Day 1’ — the 1997 interview
The most widely shared early Bezos footage: a short camcorder interview in which the 33-year-old founder explains why he chose books (‘more items in the book category than any other category, by far’), cites the 2,300 percent annual growth of web usage that made him quit his job, and calls the moment ‘the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce’.
- 1997
BBC Money Programme: ‘Will Internet Shopping Ever Take Off?’
A BBC business-programme report asking whether online shopping is viable, with Bezos interviewed about Amazon alongside Daryl Mattocks of Cambridge’s Internet Bookshop and a bakery taking orders online. Early British television exposure for Amazon, a year before Amazon.co.uk existed.
- 1999
‘Nerd of the Amazon’ — 60 Minutes II profile
Bob Simon’s 13-minute profile of the 35-year-old ‘nerd’ running Earth’s biggest bookstore: Bezos at his door desk, driving his Honda, explaining the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, and insisting that Amazon could still ‘lose it all’.
- 1999
Charlie Rose: Bezos and Peter Neupert on e-commerce
Bezos’s first appearance on Charlie Rose, paired with Peter Neupert, the Microsoft veteran running the Amazon-backed drugstore.com, to discuss the explosion of electronic commerce. Rose presses both on whether internet retailers will ever make money.
- 1999
Charlie Rose: Bezos and Jerry Yang on internet strategy
Amazon’s Bezos and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, the two faces of the consumer internet in 1999, discuss their companies’ strategies with Rose, followed by Clayton Christensen explaining the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ that both are exploiting.