The Fortune Visionaries

Bezos refuses to be defined. In 1994, he created his giant bookstore, Amazon. Then he turned it into a massive virtual marketplace. But he wasn't done: with his S3 service, he's turned his servers in a service for storing anyone's information, his Mechanical Turk has allowed the atomization of work, and the Kindle has thrown into question why we buy paper books at all.

Last year, when the global economy was shutting down, Bezos' constant experimenting paid off in Amazon ( AMZN) being one of the few dozen companies that managed a double-double: double-digit growth in revenue to $24.5 billion and profits to $902 million.

And while some have made doomsday predictions that the iPad will be the death-knell for the Kindle, the touch-screen wunderkind has a long way to go before it surpasses Amazon's superior book selection -- 60,000 to the Kindle's 450,000 -- and ease of use (hello, free 3G).

NEXT: Steven Chu