Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/;[a][3] né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964)[4] is an American internet entrepreneur, industrialist, media proprietor, and investor. Bezos is the founder and CEO[b] of the multi-national technology company Amazon. He is the richest person in the world according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires ranking.[c]
Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and later Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world's largest provider of virtual assistants[7] and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth. The company has upcoming plans to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight.[8] He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, and manages many other investments through his Bezos Expeditions venture capital firm.
Early life
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 12, 1964, the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Theodore Jørgensen.[15] His biological great-grandfather John Jørgensen immigrated to the U.S. from Holbæk in the Zealand region of Denmark in the late 19th century.[16][better source needed][17] At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19.[18] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing baby Jeff along.[19] After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968.[20] Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose surname was then changed to Bezos.[21] The family moved to Houston, Texas, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he received a degree from the University of New Mexico.[22] Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.[23] Bezos's maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.[24] Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers in his youth.[25] Bezos would later purchase this ranch and expand it from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 300,000 acres (121,406 ha).[26][27] His maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (née Strait), through whom he is a cousin of country singer George Strait.[28]
Bezos displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency, and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.[29][30] The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School.[31][32] While Bezos was in high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.[33] He attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar,[34][35] and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.[34] In his graduation speech, Bezos told the audience he dreamed of the day when mankind would colonize space. A local newspaper quoted his intention "to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park".[36] In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science; he was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[37][38] While at Princeton, Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club.[39] In addition, he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).[40][41]
Business Career
Early career
After Bezos graduated college in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others.[42] He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.[43] Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.[44][42]
Amazon
In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore.[45] He left his job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle.[46][47] Prior to settling on Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.[48] Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet.[49] He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.[47] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.[50] Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.[44][49] Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering (IPO).[51] In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the Internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.[49]
In March 2018, Bezos dispatched Amit Agarwal, Amazon's global senior vice president, to India with $5.5 billion to localize operations throughout the company's supply chain routes.[68] Later in the month, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Amazon and Bezos, specifically of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices.[69] Amazon's share price fell by 9% in response to the President's negative comments; this reduced Bezos's personal wealth by $10.7 billion.[70] Weeks later, Bezos recouped his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University indicated that Trump could do little to regulate Amazon in any meaningful way.[71] During July 2018, a number of members of the U.S. Congress called on Bezos to detail the applications of Amazon's face recognition software, Rekognition.[72] Additionally, statements by the Trump administration, in favor of overturning the antitrust law known as the Paramount Decree, have been predicted to help Amazon acquire the Landmark Theaters chain.[73]