Sorry, sloppy typing on my phone. He drives the vision and values of the company, makes major strategic decisions, and so on. He decided to reinvest all profit

Sorry, sloppy typing on my phone. He drives the vision and values of the company, makes major strategic decisions, and so on. He decided to reinvest all profits into the growth of the company for more than a decade, despite immense whining from investors. And he drove the internal systems to be so well decoupled that AWS could spring out from internal infrastructure as an amazingly successful secondary business. And countless other things. It sounds like you are describing the generic, money-manager CEO that is brought in to run an existing stable business. I don't think Bezos fits that mold. Even in your own description, you said: > build a tappable revenue pipeline. which is much beyond the capabilities of a pure salesperson. I totally agree that great CEOs need to be great salespeople (the good kind... not the slimy kind). But that is only one aspect of what they need to do -- especially for complex, changing domains like where Amazon operates.