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.