Bezos dumps the spin and states the obvious

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's charismatic CEO and Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999, has admitted that his share price is "volatile" and "not a stock you can sleep well with at night".

But what's the fuss all about? It's not the first time Bezos has said something along these lines. Back in 1999, he told the Fox News Network: "...in our last quarterly conference call, I recommended to small investors that they not invest in any, you know, pure internet stocks, especially Amazon.com, because I think that these stocks are so volatile."

He's been even more forthright than that. When borrowing $300,000 from his parents to start Amazon, he claims to have told them: "I think there's a 70 per cent chance you're going to lose all your money, so don't invest unless you can afford to lose it." This latest comment merely follows in that tradition.

Bezos has a track record of being a bit of a wag - his laugh has been compared to "a flock of Canadian geese on nitrous oxide" - and he often speaks frankly to the press.

But his real crime here isn't spilling any beans, or saying anything a sensible person wouldn't have known months ago. His mistake is to slip out of that stilted half-language of CEO speak, and slip an honest comment or two into the stream of management jargon and PR spin.

So he's not your usual serious American executive he's a maverick and all the more interesting for it.

Should he step down over this? Not really, at least not for this. But the other charge against Bezos is a lot more damaging and a lot more serious.

According to a New York Times report on Friday, he's under investigation for selling 800,000 shares just before a critical report from Lehman Brothers came out.

Should you dump Amazon shares? Well, if you are counting on them to keep you fed in your retirement, you shouldn't be holding them anyway.

But if you think a man with a laugh like a goose can build a viable business in five to ten years' time, there are worse gambles around. Remember, the value of your investment can go up as well as down.