Portraits of influence
#20: Jeff Bezos ’86

Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999 and one of the great dot.com pioneers, he founded Amazon.com, which changed the way Americans shop for everything from books and toys to groceries and home appliances.

Read about others on the list. Click on the illustration below to read about each person. You can also select individuals by name in the index below.

By Michael Witte ’66

Who’s who in the illustration: Numbers in parentheses represent the rankings on the PAW panel’s list.

1 Benjamin Rush 1760 (No. 7) 2 Charles Scribner 1840 (No. 17) 3 John Foster Dulles 1908 (No. 10) 4 Ralph Nader ’55 (No. 25/Tied) 5 Donald Rumsfeld ’54 (No. 25/Tied) 6 John Rawls ’43 *50 (No. 4) 7 Alan Turing *38 (No. 2) 8 Alfred Barr ’22 *23 (No. 21) 9 Jeffrey Moss ’63 (No. 12) 10 Jeff Bezos ’86 (No. 20) 11 Robert Venturi ’47 *50 (No. 19) 12 George Kennan ’25 (No. 6) 13 John Bogle ’51 (No. 23)

14 Paul Volcker ’49 (No. 15) 15 Nicholas Katzenbach ’43 (No. 16) 16 Richard Feynman *42 (No. 14) 17 John Bardeen *36 (No. 5) 18 Wendy Kopp ’89 (No. 13) 19 Laurance Rockefeller ’32 (No. 18) 20 Gary Becker ’51 (No. 11) 21 George Shultz ’42 (No. 9) 22 F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 (No. 8) 23 Norman Thomas 1905 (No. 24) 24 James Madison 1771 (No. 1) 25 Woodrow Wilson 1879 (No. 3) 26 Philip Freneau 1771 (No. 22)