EARLY employees of Amazon still remember the day the company took away their aspirin.

It was late 1999. After years of heady excess, the Internet boom was beginning to falter. Amazon, among the most celebrated of the dot-coms, was burdened with debt and spiraling losses. Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief impresario, had to impress Wall Street that he was serious about cutting costs.

But how? Amazon had never indulged employees with Silicon Valley perks like massages or sushi chefs. Just about the only thing that workers received free was aspirin. So the aspirin went.

The removal created a lot of muttering, but the cost-cutting — including layoffs — and promises of future profit helped Amazon escape the jaws of doom. Now, 14 years later, Mr. Bezos, 49, has become so rich and successful that he can surprise the world by buying The Washington Post for the equivalent of pocket change, which in his case is $250 million.

No one, apparently including Mr. Bezos himself, seems to know what he intends to do with that fabled newspaper. This is, after all, a man who once said the quality he most wanted in a wife was the ability to spring him from a third-world prison. He can probably be counted on to think unpredictably.