Jeffrey Bezos
Founder & CEO of Amazon.com
Born: 1964
Education: Princeton University, 1986 graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Amazon.com, the internet retailer that Bezos founded 1996, managed to show its first quarterly profit - a modest $5m - in the final quarter of 2001. With so many other dotcom retail concepts already dead, Bezos and his company, these days, have the air of survivors.

A far cry from his early days as an entrepreneur in 1994 when he quit Wall Street, where he had worked as an investment banker after graduating, and went to Seattle to set up Amazon.com. Synonymous with the dotcom boom, in its six year history Amazon has gone from being the favourite child of the internet and the darling of NASDAQ, to being viewed as an avatar of all that was wrong with all e-business.

Bezos still had a long way to go to disprove criticism of his business model, but he has at least been able to guide Amazon into a period of greater maturity, where he, and his company will be judged on their ability to achieve traditional business goals.