Jeff Bezos | MediaGuardian 100 2011

Job: founder and chief executive, AmazonAge: 47Industry: media and online retailSalary: 1.6m (total remuneration)Staff: 33,700New entryFifteen years after Amazon sold its first hardback, Jeff Bezos's online retail giant has reached a significant landmark. It sold more ebooks than print books in the US for the first <a href="http://www.salehandbagsbags.com"><strong>cheap dior handbags for sale</strong></a> time. As founder and chief executive, the 47-year-old Bezos has taken his retailer from a Seattle garage to the frontier of publishing."Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," he said. "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly. We've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years."Bezos, a dotcom billionaire who founded Amazon in 1994, makes his debut appearance in this year's MediaGuardian 100, having been regarded by previous panels of judges as more of a retailer than a media operator.But with the success of the Kindle on both sides of the Atlantic, the purchase of LoveFilm and the launch of its cloud-based music service, Amazon is now indisputably one of the heavyweight digital content providers."Amazon is the biggest media seller in the UK," said one of our panellists. "Just look at the difficulties being endured by high street retailers such as HMV and Waterstones. Amazon is <a href="http://www.salehandbagsbags.com"><strong>lv handbags</strong></a> going to be the last man standing."In typical bullish fashion, Bezos told shareholders in April that Amazon would gladly sacrifice short-term profit for long-term investment. The company has made significant inroads into online video and cloud computing. Its first-quarter revenue was 9.86bn, up 38% year on the year and well ahead of Wall Street expectations, but earnings fell a third to 201m.Bezos stole a march on rivals Apple and Google by launching its ambitious music streaming service Amazon Cloud Player in March. It was not Amazon's first foray into music – it sells MP3 downloads – but it was a major move in the battle to dominate the next generation of music listening technology.Bezos is a behind-the-scenes chief executive, rarely making public pronouncements and shying away from media interviews. The former Wall Street computer scientist is said to be a hands-on manager, involved in charting the company's grand strategy and the tiny details alike.As with Amazon's fellow internet giants – Twitter, Facebook and Google – the founder remains at the helm. But where Amazon's competitors were once <a href="http://www.uwang.com.nu/plus/guestbook.php"><strong>MBT Women's Tambo Boot Black Leather Size 10.5 Width M MBT shoes</strong></a> traditional bricks-and-mortar book sellers, now the retail giant is up against Apple, Netflix and Spotify – and Bezos shows no sign of slowing down.