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Monday, October 5, 2009

New Yorker: Bezos’ Initial Google Investment Was $250K in 1998 Because “I Just Fell in Love With Larry and Sergey”

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Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant.

But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

There’s a great excerpt in the New Yorker this week.

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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Engineers Are From Mars, Media Moguls Are From Venus

And can they ever get along?
At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:
We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent [...]

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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

NBCU’s Jeff Zucker Turns Lemonade Into Lemons

Just as NBC Universal’s Hulu online video-sharing site debuted yesterday to decent reviews, including by BoomTown here, its CEO Jeff Zucker managed to fall all over himself to diss the digital media business.

Hooray for Hollywood!
In an interview with writer (and BoomTown friend!) Ken Auletta at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, the voluble Zucker (pictured here) [...]

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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