(FORTUNE Magazine) – JEFF BEZOS You don't go from obscurity to Time's person of the year in four years--Jeff Bezos made it in 1999--unless you're causing quite a stir. Nearly a decade since he started Internet retailing pioneer Amazon.com, Bezos, 39, remains one of the most controversial figures in business. Large chunks of the investment community still think his is just an online-catalog company. But Amazon's results--the stock has more than doubled over the past 12 months--increasingly demonstrate that Bezos has found a more powerful formula. Amazon makes money selling its own merchandise, and it makes money selling competitors' wares too. --Fred Vogelstein

SERGEY BRIN AND LARRY PAGE The tech world hardly noticed when this duo quit Stanford five years ago to start an Internet search engine. Now Brin, 29 (near right), and Page, 30, sit atop Google, a company that processes 250 million searches a day, or 2,900 searches a second, in 88 languages in 32 countries. By deciding what information gets featured where, they may be the new kings of content. And their coming IPO will probably make them very rich. --F.V.

DAVID NEELEMAN He started fare wars in New York from the moment he launched JetBlue at JFK in February 2000. Neeleman's idea: Offer passengers convenient long-haul routes that bypass the major airlines' hub-and-spoke systems while undercutting on price by using nonunion employees (who sometimes find their hyperkinetic 43-year-old CEO pitching in to help). In a year when the airline industry lost $11 billion, JetBlue made $55 million. --John Helyar

FRED SMITH He founded FedEx in 1971 with a revolutionary concept: Deliver packages reliably overnight. In doing so, he created an industry. Smith, 59--the only boss the $22.5 billion company has ever had--has shrewdly diversified, expanding beyond his flyboy roots into ground-package delivery beginning in 1998. He knows his way around D.C., where he speaks out on tax and trade policy. And his mantra--information about the shipment is as important as the shipment itself--has been adopted by thousands of businesses. --Alex Taylor III

LINUS TORVALDS Twelve years ago he wrote the Linux computer operating system so that he could use his home PC to write programs that would also run on his university's Sun workstations. Today Linux allows CIOs to replace multimillion-dollar proprietary systems with cheap commodity servers. Torvalds hasn't gotten rich from it because the guts of the code are free. But the 33-year-old Finn still oversees key elements of its development--which makes him a leader of one of the greatest power shifts in the computer industry since the birth of the PC. --F.V.

MEG WHITMAN The lone adult supervisor when she took the helm of eBay in 1998, Whitman, 47, now oversees a multinational corporation that's causing a ruckus far beyond the world of Beanie Babies collectors. She is seriously shaking things up in markets as diverse as electronic payment processing and auto sales. And she has changed the way office workers waste time--perhaps forever. --Adam Lashinsky