Jeffrey P. Bezos

A lot of kids in the 1960s wanted to be astronauts, but few as ardently as Jeffrey P. Bezos. A paper he wrote for a NASA student program, "The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Aging Rate of the Common Housefly," won him a trip to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. And in his high school valedictory speech, he called for colonizing space to ensure humanity's future.

Bezos, now 35, never realized those high-flying dreams. But as the founder and chief executive of online superstore Amazon.com Inc., he's on a rocket ride of his own--one certain to transform everyday life far more than Alan Shepard's first flight in space. More than anyone else, Bezos made the Internet safe for shopping. With more than 10 million customers expected to buy about $1.4 billion of books, CDs, toys, and more this year at Amazon, Bezos is poised to define the future of consumer commerce. Says Paul Saffo, futurist at the Menlo Park (Calif.) think tank Institute for the Future: "He's the Richard Sears or the F.W. Woolworth of his age."