Tony Hsieh (1973–2020) was an American 🏷️#entrepreneur best known as the longtime CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and apparel retailer he led from 2000 through 2020 and grew into a customer-service-obsessed operation acquired by Amazon in 2009 for roughly $1.2 billion in stock. Earlier in his career he co-founded LinkExchange, a pioneering internet advertising network sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
Beyond Zappos, Hsieh became known for a deliberate brand of company-culture engineering — codified in his 2010 book Delivering Happiness — and for the Downtown Project, a roughly $350 million personal initiative he launched in 2012 to revitalize downtown Las Vegas as a dense, walkable urban core anchored by small businesses, residential development, and the new Zappos headquarters. He stepped down as CEO of Zappos in August 2020 and died in November of that year from injuries sustained in a house fire in Connecticut; his estate and legacy have since become the subject of substantial public reporting on the final years of his life.