Brian Dumaine

When hearing Bezos’s claims that he was plain lucky, keep in mind that Pop Gise was no aw-shucks Texas rancher. He was a man who had a tremendous influence on Bezos and his career.

Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs.

Bezos’s positive attitude toward the military industrial complex stood in stark contrast to Google, which announced in late 2018 that it wouldn’t sell general-purpose facial recognition software to governments before working through important technology and policy questions.

the field of facial recognition is so new and so fraught with privacy issues, that it would behoove Amazon to follow Google here and make sure that proper safeguards are in place before letting loose this technology.

When he was finished with his arithmetic, he proudly announced to her how many years she’d lost, but got a reaction he didn’t expect. She burst into tears.

‘You’re going to find out one day that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’

he’d get so wrapped up in what he was doing that the teacher couldn’t get him to switch tasks when it was time, so she’d literally have to pick up his chair with him in it and move him to the next task station.

though, according to teachers, “not particularly gifted in leadership.”

He found that others in the major had more of a knack for the esoteric principles of that field, so he switched to electrical engineering and computer science where he felt more at home.

“You don’t want to go through life with teammates who aren’t resourceful,” he recalled. His ideal woman, he said, would possess the ability to get him out of a third-world prison.