It wasn’t too long ago that people such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, and other technology visionaries were hailed as Masters of the Universe, the creators of a New Economy that promised endless prosperity.

The dot-com collapse of 2000 and the terrorist attacks of September 11 have awakened us from that dream. But the dream-weavers themselves — and the companies they created — haven’t gone away.

A couple of years ago, Washington Post technology reporter Mark Leibovich set out to profile five leading figures of the New Economy: Gates, Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, AOL Time Warner’s Steve Case, and Cisco’s John Chambers. Those profiles have now been expanded and updated into a book, The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up To Virtually Rule Your World (Prentice Hall, 244 pages, $25).

Leibovich, who began his career as a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix, discussed his book in a telephone interview, excerpted here.

Q: How did these newspaper profiles grow into a book?

A: I’d come back from an interview with Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, and I realized that the stories I was telling my colleagues were sometimes far more interesting than what I was writing in the newspaper. Things like Bill Gates’s telling me that he had read 30 books on vacation, that he’d made notes in the margins of all of them, and that he’d written to the authors asking them to elaborate. Which I guess you can do if you’re Bill Gates.

Q: Some pretty important people got left out — for instance, Steve Jobs of Apple, John Warnock of Adobe, and Scott McNealy of Sun. How did you decide who’d make the cut and who wouldn’t?

A: My standard was that they had to be monopolists in the non-legal sense — that is, they had to have an utter stranglehold on their business. These are people who just made a business imperative out of expansion and manifest destiny and taking over the world. Steve Jobs talked about that a lot, but at the end of the day he’s just a niche player.

Q: What has changed about the way we think about these people — not just since the bursting of the dot-com bubble, but since September 11 as well? Do they somehow seem less important than they did in, say, January 2000?

A: Yes and no. Unintentionally and maybe fortuitously these people, because of their reckless ambition, do speak in some ways to the September 11 question of why does the rest of the world hate us so much.

I never thought the gee-whiz of new technology or the voyeurism of preposterous new wealth was all that relevant. I think what they’ve done culturally — in changing the way we live and in imposing their view of software architecture or changing the way we work or the way we shop — is transforming in a way that is undeniable.

Q: You did a good job of picking winners: even amid the economic carnage, these five people are all still doing well. What do you think separates the New Economy success stories from the losers?

A: If you look back at how all of these men started, except for Larry Ellison, they all came from very rich families. To be a successful entrepreneur you need to be a risk-taker, and to be a risk-taker you need to know where your next meal is coming from no matter what happens. This is very much a contrast to the traditional Industrial Age titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who came from searing poverty.

Jeff Bezos, because he was indulged with millions of dollars, was able to build a great service, a very successful company. Amazon is still around today, and eToys is not still around today [note: eToys is back online after having been acquired by the KB toy-store chain], because Bezos could give a flying fuck about profits. He just raised money and expanded and expanded and expanded, because he could. It looks like he bought himself the time and space to dominate.

Q: Do you think we’ll ever again care about business executives the way we did in the 1990s?

A: I certainly hope not. There was a kind of — this is not my term — CEO pornography in the late ’90s, the epicenter of which was Silicon Valley. The media coverage of Silicon Valley was extremely uncritical, extremely celebratory. Look no further than the fact that so many journalists went to work for dot-coms. Now we’re hearing all about the complicity of Wall Street analysts and supposedly independent auditors in creating these train wrecks. There were red flags in the late ’90s that were just missed. It wasn’t the gestalt of the times, and that’s reflected in the media.

My own personal disclaimer is that I was a tech reporter in the late ’90s. Did I write some critical stories? Yes. Do I wish I had written more? Absolutely. CEOs have always played a special role in the American mythology, but in the late ’90s it really became a kind of frivolous rock-star treatment that really served the American public and stockholders badly.

Mark Leibovich will read from The New Imperialists on Wednesday, January 30, at 7 p.m., on the third level at the Harvard Coop, in Harvard Square. For more information, go to www.bkstore.com/harvard/fun.cgi