Jeffrey Preston Bezos or Jeff Bezos (born in Albuquerque, on January 12, 1964) is an American businessman known for founding, and being the president and CEO of Amazon, an important and famous e-commerce company in the United States.
| Full name | Jeffrey Preston Bezos |
|---|---|
| Known as | Found and direct the Amazon.com |
| Birth date | January 12, 1964 |
| Birthplace | Albuquerque, New Mexico |
| Residence | Seattle, Washington |
| Nationality | North American |
| Fortune | $171 billion (April 2022) |
| Stature | 1.73m |
| Spouse | Scott MacKenzie (m. 1993; Div. 2019) |
| Child(s) | 4 |
| Alma mater | Princeton University (BS) |
| Occupation | Businessman |
| Employer | Amazon |
| Position | Chairman of Amazon |
| Space career | |
| Blue Origin Passenger | |
| Flight duration | 10m 18s |
| Agency | Blue Origin |
| Flight | NS-16 |
| Official website | |
| Amazon |
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Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He went on to work on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 until the beginning of 1994. Bezos founded Amazon.com in late 1994. The company began trading in books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, and most recently began investing in video and audio streams. It is currently the world’s largest online sales company as well as the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services arm. Bezos also has a number of other business investments that are managed through Bezos Expeditions.
Jeff Bezos diversified his business interests when he founded the aerospace company Blue Origin in 2000. He bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. Blue Origin began testing flights into space in 2015 and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight began in 2018.
In January 2018, following the opening of Amazon Go’s first Seattle unit, Jeff Bezos became the richest man in history since 1982, with a fortune of $113 billion.
In August 2020, according to a survey by Forbes magazine, Bezos reached a fortune of more than $200 billion. He is the first to reach this mark since the magazine began monitoring billionaires in 1982.
In 2021, Bezos left Amazon, he said, to stay on other projects such as the direction of the Washington Post and his space company, Blue Origin. On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos flew into space alongside his brother, Mark Bezos. The flight lasted more than 10 minutes, reaching an apogee of 66.5 miles.
Childhood and education of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and father Ted Jorgensen. Ted was born in Chicago. His maternal ancestors were settlers living in Texas and, over the generations, acquired a 25,000-acre ranch near Cotulla, Texas. As of March 2015, his family’s properties were among the largest in the state. Bezos’ maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque. Gise retired early and went to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers at a young age working with him.
Bezos Jacklyn’s mother (born 1946) was seventeen and was still in high school at the time of her birth. His marriage to Ted Jorgensen lasted a little over a year. In April 1968 (when Jeff was 4 years old), she married her second husband, Miguel “Mike” Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who arrived alone in the United States when she was fifteen. Mike Bezos had worked at the University of New Mexico. He married Jacklyn and adopted 4-year-old Jeff Jorgensen, whose last name changed to Bezos. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston and Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.
Jeff Bezos often showed scientific interests and technological proficiency; he once manipulated an electrical alarm to keep his younger brothers out of his room. The family moved to Miami, Florida where they attended Miami Palmetto High School. In high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982. He was a Valedictorian in high school and a National Merit Study.
In 1986, Bezos graduated from Princeton University with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. At Princeton, he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and served as president of the Princeton Chapter of Students for Space Exploration and Development.
Jeff Bezos career
Early career
After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the field of computer science. He then worked on building an international trade network for a company known as Fitel. Also, he worked at Bankers Trust. He later worked on business opportunities with Internet access in hedge funds at D. E. Shaw & Co.
Amazon.com
Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after taking a cross-country trip from New York to Seattle, writing Amazon’s business plan on the way. He initially installed the company in his garage. He left his well-paid job at a New York City hedge fund after learning “about the rapid growth of Internet use”, which coincided with a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling that exempted mail-order companies from collecting sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence. Bezos’ parents invested $300,000 of their retirement savings in Amazon.
Bezos is known for his attention to business details. As described by Portfolio.com, he “is at the same time a happy tycoon and a remarkable micromanager […] an executive who wants to know everything from the minutiae of the contract to the way it is quoted in all Amazon press releases”.
On Saturday, August 15, 2015, The New York Times published an article titled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” about Amazon’s business practices. Bezos responded to his employees with a memo on Sunday, refuting the article’s inferences that the company was “a desperate, dystopian workplace where there is no fun and no laughter” and to those who believed that story was true should contact it directly.
In May 2016, Bezos sold more than one million shares of his stakes in the company for $671 million, making it the largest amount of money he had ever raised in a sale of his Amazon holdings. On August 4, 2016, he sold another million of his shares worth $756.7 million. As of June 19, 2016, Bezos owned 83.9 million Amazon shares, 16.9% of all outstanding shares, with a market value of $83.9 billion. On January 19, 2018, Amazon’s stock rose to $1,300 per share, at which price 83.9 million shares would be worth just over $109 billion, although Bezos has sold its shares to increase money to other companies since 2016, in particular Blue Origin.
Blue Origin
In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company, partly a result of its fascination with space travel, including an early interest in developing “space hotels, amusement parks, colonies, and small towns for 2 million or 3 million people living in Earth’s orbit”. The company was kept secret for a few years; it became publicly known only in 2006 when it purchased considerable land in West Texas for testing facilities.
In a 2011 interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help “people get into space” and stated that the company was committed to lowering the cost and increasing the safety of spaceflight. “Blue Origin is one of several Startups with the goal of opening space travel to paying customers. Like Amazon, the company was secret, but in September 2011 it was revealed that Blue Origin had lost a prototype unmanned vehicle over a short period of time. While this was a setback, the announcement of the loss revealed for the first time how far the Blue Origin team had advanced,” he said.
Bezos said the accident was not the result Blue Origin wanted, but they were all aware of the difficulty. A profile published in 2013 described a Miami Herald interview in 1982 that he gave after he was named the high school class statesman. Bezos, 18, said he wanted to build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit. “The idea is to preserve the land,” he told the newspaper… The goal was to be able to evacuate humans into space. The planet would become a park.” In 2013, Bezos reportedly discussed spaceflight commercial opportunities and strategies with Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic.
In 2015, Bezos further discussed his motivation for his spaceflight business when he announced a new orbiting vehicle in development for the first flight in late 2010. He indicated that his ambitions in space did not depend on location – Mars, Moon, asteroids, etc. – “we want to go everywhere, [requiring significantly lower launch costs]. Our number one opponent is gravity… Blue Origin’s vision is quite simple. We want to see millions of people living and working in space. This is going to take a long time. I think it’s a worthwhile goal”.
In 2016 Bezos opened the blue rocket manufacturing facility for journalists for the first time and gave extensive interviews that included articulating his vision for space and Blue Origin. Bezos sees the space as being “full of resources” and predicts a “Great Inversion” where “the commercialization of space that spans hundreds of years will emerge, leading to an era in which millions of people would live and work in space.” He sees energy and heavy manufacturing occurring in space, having the effect of reducing pollution on Earth, reducing the likelihood that something “bad will happen to the Earth.” Bezos said he is trying to change the fundamental cost structure of access to space.
On November 23, 2015, Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle successfully passed into space, reaching the planned test altitude of 1009 kilometers before performing a vertical landing at the launch site in West Texas.
Blue Origin is in an extensive New Shepard flight testing program, which expects to begin carrying “test passengers” in 2017 and start commercial flights in 2018. Blue is building six of the vehicles to support all phases of testing and operations: test flights without passengers, test passenger flights, and weekly commercial passenger operations.
In June 2016, Bezos reiterated his long-term goal of seeing nearly all heavy industrial manufacturing plants in space as part of a wide-ranging but rare interview. In September 2016, he added that he hoped to colonize the solar system. Recently, Bezos also revealed that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to fund his rocket company Blue Origin.
In July 2018, Blue Origin announced that it intends to contribute to man’s return to the Moon by 2023.
The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. “This is unexplored land,” he told the newspaper, “and it will require experimentation”. Shortly after the announcement of the purchase intention, The Washington Post published a lengthy profile of Bezos on August 10, 2013. The sale ended on October 1, 2013, and Bezos’ Nash Holdings LLC took control.
Bezos Expeditions
Bezos makes personal investments through the venture capital vehicle Bezos Expeditions and supports companies in a wide range of industries. He was one of Google’s first shareholders when he invested $250,000 in 1998. This investment resulted in 3.3 million Google shares worth $3.1 billion. He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life extension research company that hopes to slow or stop the aging process.
A partial list of companies that were financed at least in part by Bezos’ expeditions include:
- Airbnb – online home rental market
- Aviary – software (photo editing)
- Basecamp – software (project management)
- Behance – self-promotion network
- Blue Origin – Space Travel
- Business Insider – publication
- Crowdrise – for-profit charity donation platform
- Dome – software (business intelligence)
- D-Wave – Quantum computing
- General Assembly (School) – technological
- General Fusion – Sustainable energy (Nuclear fusion)
- Glassybaby – supports cancer patients
- Google – Search engine
- Juno Therapeutics – biopharmaceutical cancer
- Kongregate – online games
- Linden Lab – online games (Second Life)
- Lookout – technology (mobile security)
- MakerBot Industries – 3D Printers
- MFG.com-manufacturer direct market
- Nextdoor – localized social networks
- Pelago – online games
- Powerset – search engine in natural language
- Pro.com – domestic services market
- Qliance – health care
- Rescale – cloud computing simulations
- Rethink Robotics – manufacturing robots
- Sapphire Energy – sustainable energy (algae crude oil)
- Skytap – Cloud Computing
- Stack Exchange – technology publishing
- TeachStreet – search engine to find teachers
- Twitter – social networks
- Uber – technology and transportation
- Vessel – subscription video service
- Vicarious – artificial intelligence
- Workday – software for companies
- ZocDoc – software (medical consultations)
Bezos was also involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, Grail, Juno Therapeutics and ZocDoc. In January 2018, an announcement of Bezos’ role in an unnamed new health venture was released. This venture is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway.
Philanthropy
In July 2012, Bezos and his wife personally donated $2.5 million to support a referendum on same-sex marriage that was successfully approved in Washington. In January 2018, they announced a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States when they were minors.
Non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions include:
- Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle Museum of History and Industry – $10 million
- Recovery of two Rocketdyne F-1 engines from the first stage of the Saturn V rocket from the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. They were positively identified as belonging to the S-1C stage of the Apollo 11 mission in July 2013.
- Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute – $15 million
- Bezos Family Foundation, an educational charity The foundation is reported to be funded primarily by Bezos’ parents from his holdings in Amazon as early investors in the company.
The foundation gave $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in 2010 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Bezos also donated $800,000 to Worldreader, founded by a former Amazon employee.
In 2021 Bezos announced the $1 billion donation to be invested by 2030 to preserve 30% of planet Earth’s soil and water.
Recognition
In 1999, he was voted by Time magazine Person of the Year. In 2008, he was selected by US News & World Report as one of the best leaders in the United States. Bezos received an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial pathway to human spaceflight”.
In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for Amazon’s Kindle.
Moreover, in 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of The Year by Fortune. He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Louis. Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council between 2011 and 2012.
In 2014, he was ranked as the world’s best-performing CEO by the Harvard Business Review.
He was also named in Fortune magazine on the list of 50 major world leaders for three consecutive years, and topped the list in 2015. In September 2016, Bezos was awarded the Heinlein Award for Advances in Space Marketing, which earned him $250,000. The prize money was given to students by Bezos for The Exploration and Development of space.
Wealth
As of October 2017, Bezos has been the richest person in the world, according to Forbes, surpassing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. By 2022, Bezos had $171 billion, being the 2nd richest person in the world according to Forbes, behind Elon Musk who has $219 billion.
| Year | Billion |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 8,2 |
| 2009 | 6,8 |
| 2010 | 12,6 |
| 2011 | 18,1 |
| 2012 | 23,2 |
| 2013 | 28,9 |
| 2014 | 30,5 |
| 2015 | 34,8 |
| 2016 | 53,2 |
| 2017 | 72,8 |
| 2018 | 112 |
| 2019 | 131 |
| 2020 | 113 |
| 2021 | 200,5 |
| 2022 | 171 |
Personal life of Jeff Bezos
In 1992, MacKenzie Tuttle worked with Bezos at D.And Shaw, a New York City hedge fund. They married in 1993, and moved to Seattle in 1994. Bezos and his wife are parents of four children. They divorced in 2019.
Bezos made an appearance in the film “Star Trek Beyond (Star Trek – Without Borders),” in the role of an alien Starfleet officer, wearing heavy makeup, which does not allow him to be recognized immediately. In fact, he becomes unrecognizable because of his makeup.
On April 5, 2019, she divorced after being reported by the National Enquirer of an extramarital relationship with a former television host.
Policy
In 2012, the Bezos family raised $2.5 million for a Washington state campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Bezos criticized Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.
References (sources)
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