jeff bezos brief biography

American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.

Quick Facts

Early life and education, career in finance, amazon: start and success through the years, blue origin, owner of the washington post, healthcare venture, philanthropy: bezos day one fund and earth fund, personal life: ex-wife, fiancée, and kids.

1964-present

Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and executive chair of the e-commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post , and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the internet’s biggest success stories. He started Blue Origin in 2000, then in 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world; his estimated net worth is $137.9 billion as of May 2023.

FULL NAME: Jeffrey Preston Bezos BORN: January 12, 1964 BIRTHPLACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico SPOUSE: MacKenzie Scott (1993-2019) CHILDREN: 3 sons and 1 daughter ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, known as Jeff Bezos, was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensens were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child. He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

After high school, Bezos attended Princeton University. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos became D.E. Shaw’s youngest vice president.

While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle, and targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his site. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage; they eventually expanded operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstations.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup team had envisioned.

Amazon went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys, and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early ’90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

As part of Bezos’ 2018 annual shareholder letter, the media tycoon said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. By September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company to ever hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.

At the end of 2018, Amazon announced it was raising the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has still been criticized for its working conditions and grueling pace, with workers protesting during Prime Day in July 2019.

Amazon Instant Video & Amazon Studios

In 2006, Amazon launched its video-on-demand service. Initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video.

Bezos premiered several original programs with the launch of Amazon Studios in 2013. The company hit it big in 2014 with the critically-acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle . The company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee ’s Chi-Raq , in 2015.

In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb .

In early 2018, The Seattle Times reported that Amazon had consolidated its consumer retail operations in order to focus on growing areas including digital entertainment and Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant.

Kindle E-Reader

Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read, and store their book selections, in 2007.

Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company’s next-generation tablet designed to give Apple’s iPad a run for its money. “We haven’t built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,” Bezos said, according to ABC News .

Amazon Drones

In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called Amazon Prime Air, using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said these drones would be able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and be capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company’s distribution centers.

The first Prime Air delivery took place in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016.

Bezos oversaw one of Amazon’s few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014. Criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year.

Acquiring Whole Foods

Bezos had been eyeing the food delivery market, and in 2017, Amazon announced it had acquired the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion in cash.

The company began offering in-store deals to Amazon Prime customers and grocery delivery in as little as two hours, depending on the market. As a result, Walmart and Kroger also began offering meal delivery to its customers.

Stepping Down as Amazon CEO

In February 2021, Amazon announced that Bezos would step down as CEO in the third quarter of the year. In fact, he transitioned to executive chair of Amazon’s board slightly ahead of schedule in July. Longtime Amazon employee Andy Jassy replaced Bezos as CEO.

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes. “We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen,” Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company’s chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham .

“ The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. “But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote:

“The values of The Post do not need changing... There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper’s technology staff (hundreds of those employees published an open letter to their boss asking for salary increases and better benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted several scoops, including revealing that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russians, leading to his resignation.

By 2016, the organization said it was profitable. The following year, the Post had an ad revenue of more than $100 million, with three straight years of double-digit revenue growth. Amazon soon bypassed The New York Times digital in unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019, according to ComScore.

On January 30, 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase delivered a joint press release in which they announced plans to pool their resources to form a new healthcare company for their U.S. employees. According to the release, the company will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints” as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction for patients, with an initial focus on technology solutions.

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Bezos said. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

As one of the world’s wealthiest people, Bezos had been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of philanthropic efforts. But in recent years, he has made major philanthropic donations through two new initiatives.

In 2018, Bezos and then-wife MacKenzie Scott launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on “funding existing nonprofits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities.” The announcement came a year after Bezos had asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune. Bezos gave away $2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit.

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

Bezos met MacKenzie Scott (then MacKenzie Tuttle) when they both worked at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills to fund her writing career. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married shortly thereafter in 1993. Bezos and Scott have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

Scott was an integral part of the founding and success of Amazon, helping create Amazon’s first business plan and serving as the company’s first accountant. Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband. A novelist by trade, training under Toni Morrison during her college years at Princeton University, Scott published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright , in 2005, and her second novel, Traps , in 2013.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Bezos and Scott divorced in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Bezos’ stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his stake at nearly $110 billion and Scott’s at more than $37 billion. Scott announced that she planned to give away at least half of her wealth to charity.

Right after Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie in January 2019, The National Enquirer published an 11-page exposé of the business mogul’s extramarital affair with television host Lauren Sanchez. Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into the motives of The National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. The following month, in a lengthy post on Medium, Bezos accused AMI of threatening to publish explicit photos unless he backed off the investigation.

“Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” Bezos wrote. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

In that same post, Bezos suggested that there was possibly a link between AMI’s actions and the Saudi Arabian government. Later, a forensic analysis of Bezos’ phone revealed that it was hacked after he received a video via WhatsApp from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman .

Sanchez divorced her husband in April 2019. She and Bezos made their first public appearance as a couple that July at Wimbledon. In late May 2023, Page Six first reported that Bezos and Sanchez are engaged.

• It’s perfectly healthy—encouraged, even—to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea to.
• We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention. (On the future of The Washington Post )

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Philanthropists

Tyler Childers

Prince William

Michelle Obama

Oprah Winfrey

Madam C.J. Walker

Alec Baldwin

Prince Harry

Jimmy Carter

Rosalynn Carter

Dolly Parton

• Member Interviews
• Science & Exploration
• Public Service
• Achiever Universe
• Summit Overview
• About The Academy
• Academy Patrons
• Delegate Alumni
• Directors & Our Team
• Golden Plate Awards Council
• Golden Plate Awardees
• Preparation
• Perseverance
• The American Dream
• Recommended Books
• Find My Role Model

All achievers

Jeffrey p. bezos, founder and executive chairman, amazon.com.

Listen to this achiever on What It Takes

What It Takes is an audio podcast produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: public service, science and exploration, sports, technology, business, arts and humanities, and justice.

I knew that if I failed, I would regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

Jeffrey P. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother was still in her teens, and her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Jeffrey was four. Jeffrey’s stepfather, Mike Bezos, was born in Cuba; he escaped to the United States alone at age 15, and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Jeffrey’s mother, the family moved to Houston, where Mike Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. Jeffrey’s maternal ancestors were early settlers in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000-acre ranch at Cotulla. Jeffrey’s grandfather was a regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the family ranch, where Jeffrey spent most of the summers of his youth, working with his grandfather at the enormously varied tasks essential to the operation.

From an early age, Jeffrey displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. Even as a toddler, he asserted himself by dismantling his crib with a screwdriver. He also developed intense and varied scientific interests, rigging an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and converting his parents’ garage into a laboratory for his science projects. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Miami, Florida. In high school in Miami, Jeffrey first fell in love with computers. An outstanding student, he was valedictorian of his class. He entered Princeton University planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers, and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduation, Jeff Bezos found employment on Wall Street, where computer science was increasingly in demand to study market trends. He went to work at Fitel, a start-up company that was building a network to conduct international trade. He stayed in the finance realm with Bankers Trust, rising to a vice presidency. At D. E. Shaw, a firm specializing in the application of computer science to the stock market, Bezos was hired as much for his overall talent as for any particular assignment.  While working at Shaw, Jeff met MacKenzie Tuttle, also a Princeton graduate. They began dating and were married in 1993. Bezos rose quickly at Shaw, becoming a senior vice president, and was looking forward to a bright career in finance when he made a discovery that changed his life — and the course of business history.

The Internet was originally created by the Defense Department to keep its computer networks connected during an emergency, such as natural catastrophe or enemy attack. Over the years, it was adopted by government and academic researchers to exchange data and messages, but as late as 1994, there was still no Internet commerce to speak of. One day that spring, Jeffrey Bezos observed that Internet usage was increasing by 2,300 percent a year. He saw an opportunity for a new sphere of business, and immediately began considering the possibilities. In typically methodical fashion, Bezos reviewed the top 20 mail order businesses, and asked himself which could be conducted more efficiently over the Internet than by traditional means. Books were the commodity for which no comprehensive mail order catalogue existed, because any such catalogue would be too big to mail — perfect for the Internet, which could share a vast database with a virtually limitless number of people.

He flew to Los Angeles the very next day to attend the American Booksellers’ Convention and learn everything he could about the book business. He found that the major book wholesalers had already compiled electronic lists of their inventory. All that was needed was a single location on the Internet, where the book-buying public could search the available stock and place orders directly. Bezos’s employers weren’t prepared to proceed with such a venture, and Bezos knew the only way to seize the opportunity was to go into business for himself. It would mean sacrificing a secure position in New York, but he and his wife, Mackenzie, decided to make the leap.

Jeff and Mackenzie flew to Texas on Independence Day weekend and picked up a 1988 Chevy Blazer (a gift from Mike Bezos) to make the drive to Seattle, where they would have ready access to the book wholesaler Ingram, and to the pool of computer talent Jeff would need for his enterprise. Mackenzie drove while Jeff typed a business plan. The company would be called Amazon, for the seemingly endless South American river with its numberless branches.

They set up shop in a two-bedroom house, with extension cords running to the garage. Jeff set up three Sun microstations on tables he’d made out of doors from Home Depot for less than $60 each. When the test site was up and running, Jeff asked 300 friends and acquaintances to test it. The code worked seamlessly across different computer platforms. On July 16, 1995, Bezos opened his site to the world, and told his 300 beta testers to spread the word. In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries. By September, it had sales of $20,000 a week. Bezos and his team continued improving the site, introducing such unheard-of features as one-click shopping, customer reviews, and e-mail order verification.

The business grew faster than Bezos or anyone else had ever imagined. When the company went public in 1997, skeptics wondered if an Internet-based start-up bookseller could maintain its position once traditional retail heavyweights like Barnes and Noble or Borders entered the Internet picture. Two years later, the market value of shares in Amazon was greater than that of its two biggest retail competitors combined, and Borders was striking a deal for Amazon to handle its Internet traffic. Jeff had told his original investors there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their entire investment, but his parents signed on for $300,000, a substantial portion of their life savings. “We weren’t betting on the Internet,” his mother has said. “We were betting on Jeff.” By the end of the decade, as six percent owners of Amazon, they were billionaires. For several years, as much as a third of the shares in the company were held by members of the Bezos family.

From the beginning, Bezos sought to increase market share as quickly as possible, at the expense of profits. When he disclosed his intention to go from being “Earth’s biggest bookstore” to “Earth’s biggest anything store,” skeptics thought Amazon was growing too big too fast, but a few analysts called it “one of the smartest strategies in business history.” Through each round of expansion, Jeff Bezos continually emphasized the “Six Core Values: customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar and innovation.” “Our vision,” he said, “is the world’s most customer-centric company. The place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Amazon moved into music CDs, videos, toys, electronics and more. When the Internet’s stock market bubble burst, Amazon re-structured, and while other dot.com start-ups evaporated, Amazon was posting profits.

In October 2002, the firm added clothing sales to its line-up, through partnerships with hundreds of retailers, including The Gap, Nordstrom, and Land’s End. Amazon shares its expertise in customer service and online order fulfillment with other vendors through co-branded sites, such as those with Borders and Toys ‘R Us, and through its Amazon Services subsidiary. In September 2003, Amazon announced the formation of A9, a new venture aimed at developing a commercial search engine that focuses on e-commerce websites. At the same time, Amazon launched an online sporting goods store, offering 3,000 different brand names. Amazon.com ended 2015 with net revenue of $107 billion. Amazon has become America’s largest online retailer, with more than four times the sales of its nearest rival.

The success of Amazon has allowed Bezos to explore his lifelong interest in space travel. In 2004, he founded an aerospace company, Blue Origin, to develop new technology for spaceflight, with the ultimate goal of establishing an enduring human presence beyond Earth. From its 26-acre research campus outside Seattle and a private rocket launching facility in West Texas, Blue Origin is testing New Shepard, a multi-passenger rocket-propelled vehicle designed to travel to and from suborbital space at competitive prices. New Shepard will allow researchers to conduct more frequent experiments in a microgravity environment, as well as providing the general public with an opportunity to experience spaceflight. In its mission statement, Blue Origin identifies its ultimate goal as the establishment of an enduring human presence in outer space.

As exciting as that prospect may be, Jeff Bezos has had more terrestrial innovations on his mind as well. In 2007, Amazon introduced a handheld electronic reading device — the Kindle. The device used “E Ink” technology to render text in a print-like appearance, without the eyestrain associated with television and computer screens. The font size was adjustable for further ease in reading, and, unlike earlier electronic reading devices, the Kindle incorporated wireless Internet connectivity, enabling the reader to purchase, download and read complete books and other documents anywhere, anytime. Hundreds of books can be stored on the Kindle at a time. Many classics can be downloaded free of charge; all new titles were initially priced at $9.99.

In the year the Kindle was introduced, Amazon’s sales increased by 38 percent, and its profits more than doubled. In 2010, Amazon signed a controversial deal with The Wylie Agency, in which Wylie gave Amazon the digital rights to the works of many of the authors it represents, bypassing the original publishers altogether. This, and Amazon’s practice of selling e-books at a price far below that of the same title in hardcover, angered several publishers, as well as some authors, who see their royalty rates threatened. But it appears that the advent of electronic reading devices is increasing the overall sales of books, which can only benefit readers and authors alike. By mid-2010, Kindle and e-book sales had reached $2.38 billion, and Amazon’s sales of e-books topped its sales in hardcover. With e-book sales increasing by 200 percent a year, Bezos predicted that e-books would overtake paperbacks and become the company’s bestselling format within a year.

With the introduction of the Kindle, Amazon quickly captured 95 percent of the U.S. market for books in electronic form — e-books. The first major challenge to the Kindle’s supremacy in the e-book market came in 2010, when Apple introduced its iPad tablet computer, which was also designed for use as an electronic reading device. Bezos responded aggressively, cutting the Kindle’s retail price and adding new features.

In 2011, Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a mini tablet computer with a color touch screen, to compete directly with the iPad. Amazon also took the handheld e-reader to a new level of comfort and convenience with the Kindle Paperwhite, an illuminated touchscreen device that can be read comfortably in a darkened room. A Whispersync feature enables users with multiple devices to mark their place in one book and resume reading at the same place in another. Having already revolutionized the way the world buys books, Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way we read them as well.

Amazon now boasts a host of diversified subsidiaries, including AmazonLocal and LivingSocial. Business customers can employ Amazon’s online infrastructure technology through Amazon Web Services. In 2012, Bezos launched Amazon Studios, crowdsourcing the development of feature films and television shows. Amazon plans to present the television programs through an online video service, the feature films in brick-and-mortar theaters. The company’s share price increased 30 percent in 2012 alone, tenfold over the previous six-year period. Fortune magazine named Bezos its 2012 “Businessperson of the Year.”

In 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper division of The Washington Post Company for $250 million. In addition to The Washington Post , the leading daily newspaper in the nation’s capital, the sale included a number of smaller local newspapers in the Washington, D.C. area. Bezos made the purchase as principal of a privately held company, rather than on behalf of Amazon. It was the first time in 80 years that the newspaper had passed from the control of the Graham family, descendants of Eugene Meyer, who bought the paper in 1933. At the time of the sale, Bezos expressed respect and admiration for the Graham family’s stewardship of the Post and announced his intention to retain the existing management.

Early in 2017, Bloomberg News estimated that Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $75.6 billion, making him the second wealthiest person in the world, second only to Microsoft founder  Bill Gates . That summer, the rapid rise in the value of Amazon shares boosted the value of the founder’s stake by over  $1 billion in a single day. Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos became noted philanthropists in the Seattle area.  “Giving away money takes as much attention as building a successful company,” Jeff Bezos has said.

In 2017, Amazon purchased national grocery retailer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.   While Whole Foods stores will continue to sell high-end delicacies and organic produce, they will also serve as delivery locations for Amazon’s online retail business, extending the company’s reach into ever more areas of the economy.  As the world entered the 2017 holiday shopping season, Amazon’s stock price soared, raising the net worth of founder Jeff Bezos and making him the wealthiest person in the world.  His net worth continued to grow, and in July 2018 was estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index to be over $150 billion, roughly $55 billion greater than that of anyone else on Earth.

In addition to their philanthropic activities, MacKenzie Bezos has pursued a separate career as a novelist, publishing The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and Traps in 2013.  Together, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos founded the homeless charity Day One Fund in 2018.   In January 2019, the couple announced plans to divorce.   Over the course of their 25-year marriage, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos raised four children and maintained homes in Medina, Washington and in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Van Horn, Texas.

In the first months of 2020, a global pandemic rocked the world’s economy, but as people all over the world sheltered at home, the demand for Amazon’s online services exploded and the company’s stock price surged along with it. By August 2020, his personal stake in the company gave Jeff Bezos an estimated net worth of more than $200 billion, making him by far the wealthiest individual in history.

At the peak of this success, Jeff Bezos announced his decision to relinquish the role of CEO at Amazon, effective as of summer 2021. He continues to serve as Executive Chairman of the global retail, communications and media empire he has built.  He is now focusing more of his energy on his aerospace initiative Blue Origin. In 2021, he announced that he will be one of the crew on board Blue Origin’s first manned space flight. On July 14, 2021, the Smithsonian Institution announced it would receive a $200 million donation from Jeff Bezos — the largest gift to the Smithsonian since the Institution’s founding gift from James Smithson in 1846. A $70 million portion of the donation will support the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum and $130 million will launch a new education center at the museum.

In March 2023, Jeff Bezos was featured on Forbes ‘ “World’s Billionaires” list with an estimated net worth of $114 billion.

On May 19, 2023, a team led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin won a coveted $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a 50-foot-tall spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the moon’s surface. The mission, Artemis V, is scheduled to launch in 2029 and is another critical piece of NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the moon as part of an effort to explore its south pole region.

On May 22, 2023, Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, announced their engagement. The couple, who made their relationship public in 2019, have largely kept their personal lives under wraps, mostly appearing together at various public events. Sánchez, a former broadcast journalist turned philanthropist, and Bezos have been working together on their philanthropic endeavors, strategically distributing Bezos’s vast wealth to a variety of causes.

“I’m going to go do this crazy thing. I’m going to start this company selling books online.”

In 1994, Jeff Bezos was a 30-year-old vice president of a New York investment firm, newly married, with a secure and prosperous future ahead of him. He decided to give it all up and drive to Seattle with his wife, in a used car, to start a business in their garage. He was betting his own savings — and his parents’ and friends’ — on a totally untried notion: that people would buy books through a little-known network of computers called the Internet.

Jeff Bezos was convinced that this global network, primarily the domain of academics and government scientists, could become a vibrant new venue for commerce, with the right product and the right plan. Almost overnight, the company Bezos started, Amazon.com, changed the book-buying habits of a nation. Bezos and his investors found their shares in the company worth billions.

As the company’s capitalization soared, Bezos embarked on a risky strategy of expansion, forgoing immediate profits to secure an ever-larger share of the Internet market, not only in books, but in music, videos, electronics, toys and clothing. At the turn of the 21st century, the Internet bubble burst, and fortunes seemingly made overnight literally vanished. Yet Amazon flowed on like its mighty namesake, still expanding, but also showing profits, while other promising start-ups faded from the scene. Once-daunting competitors had become grateful partners.  By 2018, the growth in Amazon’s stock price had made its founder and principal shareholder the wealthiest man in history.  The vision of Jeff Bezos had prevailed, and the world of commerce had changed forever.

When did you get the idea to start Amazon? Was there a moment of inspiration?

Jeff Bezos: The wake-up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don’t grow that fast.   It’s highly unusual, and that started me about thinking, “What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”

You couldn’t have been the only one to see that growth statistic.

Jeff Bezos: No. In fact, not only was I not the only one, but a lot of people saw it much earlier.

Not everyone has been able to realize that potential the way you have. What do you think enabled you to see what you saw and to act on it?

Jeff Bezos: I think there are a couple of things. One of the things everybody should realize is that any time a start-up company turns into a substantial company over the years, there was a lot of luck involved. There are a lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who are very smart, very hardworking, very few ever have the planetary alignment that leads to a tiny little company growing into something substantial. So that requires not only a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, a big team of people who are all dedicated, but it also requires that not only the planets align, but that you get a few galaxies in there aligning, too. That’s certainly what happened to us.

Our timing was good, our choice of product categories — books — was a very good choice. And we did a lot of analysis on that to pick that category as the first best category for e-commerce online, but there were no guarantees that that was a good category. At the time we launched this business it wasn’t even crystal clear that the technology would improve fast enough that ordinary people — non-computer people — would even want to bother with this technology. So that was good luck. So there are a whole bunch of things that have to sort of align to make it work.

Here you were, sitting in New York City in a very good job, a lucrative position with a future. You go home and you say to your wife you want to throw all that over and get in the car and go to Seattle. What possessed you to do that? What was her reaction? What is the role of risk taking?

Jeff Bezos: I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two-hour walk in Central Park in New York City, and the conclusion of that was this: he said, “You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. So, I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, “Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do.” It’s true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Most regrets, by the way, are acts of omission and not commission. If you do bad things, if you go murder somebody, that would be bad and that would be an act of commission that you would regret. But most everyday, ordinary non-murderers, when they’re 80 years old, their big regrets are omissions.

When you showed up in Seattle, you had left your job, you’d left any regrets you might have behind you. How do you get something like Amazon.com started? What did you have to do?

Jeff Bezos: That blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages, and one of the reasons it’s hard is because at that stage there’s nobody counting on you but yourself. Today it’s easy because we’ve got millions of customers counting on us, and thousands of investors counting on us, and thousands of employees all counting on each other. In that beginning stage it’s really just you, and you can quit any time. Nobody is going to care, so you set about doing the simple things first.

So, you want to start a company.   Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan, and so I did that.   I wrote about a 30-page business plan.   I wrote a first draft.   In fact, I wrote the first draft on the car trip from the East Coast to the West Coast.   And, that is very helpful. You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality. It will always be different. The reality will never be the plan, but the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on.   So, that’s the first step.

We tried to get a lot of the little housekeeping details done even before we arrived in Seattle. I called a friend who lived in Seattle and asked if he could recommend an attorney. He recommended his divorce lawyer, but that’s who we used. It was a general practitioner, a sort of small sole practitioner. He incorporated the company. He asked me on the cell phone what name would you like the company incorporated under. I said, “Cadabra, as in abra cadabra.” And he said, “Cadaver?” I knew then that was not going to be a good name. We went ahead and incorporated under that name. We changed it about three months later.

I stopped in San Francisco and interviewed vice presidents of engineering, because that was going to be an important long lead time item. We needed to build the technology that would run the store, and found the person who turned out to be the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com on that trip. A guy named Shel Kaphan, who built all of our early systems. He had help from others, but he was the architect, he engineered them, and just did a fantastic job. So writing the business plan, the initial hiring, getting the company incorporated, all these are simple, almost pedestrian tasks, but that’s how you start, one step at a time.

Were investors knocking at your door?

Jeff Bezos: Oh no.

The first initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com.   And you know, that was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do because they didn’t know. My dad’s first question was, “What’s the Internet?” Okay.   So he wasn’t making a bet on this company or this concept.   He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother. So, I told them that I thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their whole investment, which was a few hundred thousand dollars, and they did it anyway.   And, you know, I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because   really, if you look at the odds of a start-up company succeeding at all, it’s only about ten percent.   Here I was, giving myself a 30 percent chance.

There are so many things that can go wrong. When we launched that store in July of 1995, we were shocked at the customer response. Literally in the first 30 days we had orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries, and we were woefully unprepared from an operational point of view to handle that kind of volume. In fact, we quickly expanded. We talked to our landlord, and we expanded into a 2,000-square-foot basement warehouse space that had six-foot ceilings. One of our ten employees was six-two; he went around like this the whole time. We were doing our day jobs, which might have been computer programming — all the different things that ten people will do in a tiny start-up company. And then we would spend all afternoon into the wee hours of the morning packing up the orders and shipping them out. I would drive these things to UPS so we could get the last one, and we would wait till the last second. I’d get to UPS and I would sort of bang on the glass door that was closed. They would always take pity on me and sort of open up and let us ship things late.

We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for, that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all. In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor. I remember, just to show you how stupid I can be — my only defense is that it was late. We were packing these things, everybody in the company, and I had this brainstorm as I said to the person next to me, “This packing is killing me! My back hurts, this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor,” and this person said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” And I said, “You know what we need?” My brilliant insight. “We need knee pads!'” I was very serious, and this person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they’d ever seen. I’m working for this person? This is great. “What we need is packing tables .”

I looked at this person, and I thought that was the smartest idea I had ever heard.   The next day we got packing tables, and I think we doubled our productivity.   That early stage, by the way of Amazon.com, when we were so unprepared, is probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us, because it formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company.   Every single person in the company, because we had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well, and that is our goal, to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.   In a second round of fundraising, about a year later or so, we raised a million dollars, and I had to talk to about 60 different people.   These were angel investors. Venture capitalists were totally uninterested. It wasn’t like what people think of today.

In 1998 and 1999 you could raise $60 million for an Internet idea without a business plan with a single phone call.   It was a very different era, but back in 1995 it was very difficult to raise money. And, by the way, it wasn’t more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money, it just was sort of normally hard. It’s supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. So, with a lot of hard work we raised that million dollars from about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each, and that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com.

Did you ever have any self-doubts, fear of failure?

Jeff Bezos: In a strange way, no. Because remember…

Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way — it’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic — and so if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It’s sort of like, I don’t have any doubt about whether we’re going to fail. That’s the likely outcome. It just is, and to pretend that it’s not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So, what you do with those early investment dollars — if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars — what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So, you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are, and you try to eliminate them one at a time. That’s how small companies get a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where the company has more control over its future destiny.

When a company is very tiny, it needs a tremendous amount of not only hard work but, as we talked about earlier, luck.   As a company gets bigger, it starts to become a little more stable. At a certain point in time the company has a much bigger influence over its future outcome, and it needs a lot less luck, and instead it needs the hard work.   At that point there’s a little bit more pressure, because if you fail you have nobody to blame but yourself.

• 25 photos

Jeff Bezos: The Man Behind Amazon‘s Meteoric Rise

• by history tools
• March 25, 2024

Introduction

Jeff Bezos is one of the most influential individuals in the world today. As the founder and CEO of Amazon, the online retail giant that has revolutionized commerce, he has become an iconic figure in business. His drive, vision, and ruthless competitiveness have propelled him to astronomical success.

Bezos is currently ranked as the third richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $126.9 billion as of May 2023. His story is one of boundless ambition realized through technological innovation. This article traces his journey from humble beginnings to internet fame and fortune.

Fun Fact: Jeff Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. At the age of 4, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos who adopted Jeff and gave him his last name.

Early Life and Education

Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and his biological father Ted Jorgensen. His mother soon divorced Jorgensen and married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos in 1968 who adopted four year old Jeff.

Jeff displayed signs of high intelligence and entrepreneurial skills from an early age. According to biographers, as a toddler he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed. He was also extremely curious, resourceful and spent summers figuring out how to fix windmills and electronic gadgets at his grandfather’s ranch. His grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise trained him in science and greatly influenced Jeff’s worldview.

The family moved to Miami where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. He graduated as high school valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. He developed a love for computers and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a Bachelor‘s degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Fun Fact: Bezos pushed himself so hard in school that he had to be hospitalized after fainting during a high school track workout. Doctors initially feared it was a stroke!

The Origins of Amazon

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found employment on Wall Street where his technical skills and computer science knowledge led to quick success. By 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at investment firm D.E Shaw.

It was during this time that Bezos came up with the idea behind Amazon. Surfing the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, he identified the potential for selling books online after discovering that web usage grew by 2,300% in just one year in 1994. He envisioned tapping this burgeoning online audience through an ecommerce store.

He quit his cushy six figure job against the advice of superiors, moved to Seattle in 1994 and began work out of his garage on an online bookstore.

The fledgling company was originally named Cadabra but Bezos re-branded it to Amazon. He chose the name because it began with an A and conjured images of the exotic and different, just like his online bookstore.

On July 16, 1995, Amazon opened its virtual doors on the web. Sales were slow in the first month but Bezos was determined. His parents invested nearly $250,000 into the start up. The company went public in 1997 during the peak of the dot.com boom raising $54 million from investors.

Key Fact: When Amazon stock debuted, the share price was $18 adjusted for splits. At its peak in 2021, it traded at $3500!

His vision was simple yet groundbreaking — to deliver convenience, choice and affordability to customers no matter where they were located. Technology would seamlessly connect buyers and sellers in a virtual marketplace unlike any before. His strategy also leveraged data and analytics to recommend relevant products catered to each shopper. It was a new disruptive model that caught on quickly.

Image source: Business Insider

The Rise of Amazon Empire

In just a few short years after launch, Amazon became a multi-billion dollar company that would come to dominate entire industries. It survived the dot.com crash when other rivals faltered and eventually turned profitable.

Bezos expanded decisively from books into new digital media like ebooks, music, video streaming alongside traditional retail across consumer electronics, apparel and more.

This relentless drive is best explained by Jeff’s own quote:

“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you… you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.”

Some major milestones that propelled Amazon’s rise over its 25+ year history:

• 1995 – Launched online bookstore Amazon.com
• 1997 – IPO raises $54 million, share price $18
• 1999 – Expands shop to include electronics, toys, home goods
• 2002 – The first year Amazon turned a profit of $5 million on revenues of $3.9 billion after the dotcom crash
• 2005 – Launches Amazon Prime subscription service
• 2006 – Launches Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company‘s cloud computing unit which pioneered Infrastructure as a Service
• 2007 – Entered consumer electronics segment and launched revolutionary Kindle e-reader
• 2018 – Record profits soar to $10 billion on revenues of $232 billion making Amazon the second company after Apple to be valued at $1 trillion
• 2021 – Amazon posts astonishing $33.4 billion profit growing at 37% clip amid pandemic lockdowns

Fun Fact : When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, the internet had only 200 million users globally. Today over 4.5 billion people have internet access – a 22 fold increase!

Image source: Statista

To power Amazon’s rapid expansion across verticals, Bezos adopted a customer centric approach to business unusual among other corporations whose sole focus was profits. As Bezos puts it:

“We see our customers as guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It‘s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better”

This company mandate has richly rewarded Amazon through patronage from over 200 million paying customers around the world across demographics. The ecommerce pioneer was also quick to harness emerging technologies like cloud computing, data analytics and AI to its advantage. Having started as a humble online bookseller, few could have predicted its rise as a global technology titan.

Expert Views on His Success

Renowned business thought leader Ram Charan analyzed how Bezos built Amazon into an empire:

“Jeff Bezos’s genius lies in having the courage to steadfastly chart Amazon‘s course with unlimited truth-seeking and no sacred cows while also balancing multiple constituencies."

For technology investor Roger McNamee,

"Bezos wins because he is always playing the long game. He has the most articulated vision of any CEO."

Other Major Ventures

Blue origin.

Taking forward his childhood dreams, Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 — an aerospace company focused on developing reusable rockets and technologies that could enable human life in space.

The lifelong Star Trek fan has often spoken about preserving the Earth through exploitation of extra-planetary resources. As early as high school, Bezos displayed tremendous scientific aptitude by launching an experiment to measure air friction during a falling object‘s flight.

He funds Blue Origin annually with Amazon stock sales. In July 2021, at age 57 Bezos flew aboard New Shepard and officially became an astronaut in the first human spaceflight by his company. He aims to create space infrastructure that drastically reduces costs and makes it viable for millions of people to work and live in space long term.

However, experts have questioned whether Blue Origin can catch up to rival SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk which already has numerous space flights under its belt. Bezos‘ expertise at long term execution provides some hope. Only time will tell if his private space dreams entered late take off or fail.

The Washington Post

In August 2013, Bezos made another surprise investment by acquiring The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million cash. His stewardship revitalized the struggling publication through significant technology upgrades.

By incorporating machine learning and AI to content recommendations, the newspaper saw massive growth as a digital media company. Bezos also guided key investments into video content and multimedia journalism.

However, his ownership of a major political media outlet has raised some conflict of interest issues since Amazon has significant business interests involving the federal government. But Bezos has stayed away from editorial involvement upholding press freedom.

Leadership Style & Advice

Bezos is known for his relentless approach to business with the highest standards of operational excellence. His leadership style focuses intensely on nurturing internal innovation versus reacting to competition.

As per Brad Stone’s book The Everything Store , Bezos “crafted emails that read like policy papers” and “brooked no dissent” from executives who failed to meet his exacting benchmarks. Former high ranking managers have described Amazon’s internal environment as adversarial and unforgiving.

While Bezos makes quick decisions where he has conviction, he prefers exhaustive research and input from experts on complex technology matters. Before launching new products, Amazon rigorously polled customers to shape development.

Key Leadership Principles

Image source: Backlinko

For budding entrepreneurs, Bezos emphasizes embracing risk-taking rather than fearing failure itself. Being flexible, creative and open minded is also key when experimenting with new ideas. As he puts it:

“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

Fun Fact: Jeff Bezos still personally approves every new product on Amazon‘s catalog and interviews senior candidates in all departments

Bezos‘ Successful Innovations

While Amazon itself dominated commerce through relentless technological innovation rarely seen before, Jeff Bezos is also credited with a few other key inventions behind modern online retail.

One Click Buying

In the late 1990s, Bezos introduced 1-Click ordering which enabled Amazon customers to effortlessly buy products with a single mouse click. This patented innovation eliminated tedious payment and shipping confirmation steps revolutionizing convenience in ecommerce. Competitors like Apple found the technology so compelling that even they could not initially match it.

Amazon Prime

Seeing saturation of discount shoppers, Bezos conceived of the Amazon Prime program in 2005. This first-of-its kind membership package bundled free 2-day shipping with access to movies, music and exclusive deals. It created loyal paying subscribers driving higher sales. Prime now boasts over 200 million members globally as of 2021.

Kindle E-Reader

With the 2007 launch of Kindle, Amazon pioneered modern e-readers. Bezos realized that existing tablets were poor at replicating print experience crucial for books. The e-ink display and seamless connectivity to download ebooks sparked the now multi-billion dollar digital publishing market. Since inception, over 100 million Kindles have been sold as of 2019.

Political Views & Policy Issues

On most policy issues, Bezos has remained studiously quiet unlike fellow tech billionaires. However, his political leanings tilt liberal stemming from a libertarian ideology favoring social liberalism and free markets devoid of pesky regulation.

He has strongly endorsed the rights of gay and lesbian communities including legalizing same sex marriages. On divisive topics, he prefers pragmatism and does not loudly champion issues at cost of disaffecting any particular social group.

As CEO of one of America‘s largest employers, Bezos has emerged as an influential voice on key economic policies. He has advocated increasing federal corporate taxes to fund infrastructure programs like roads, education and healthcare where government investment is rational. However, this has drawn ire from critics on both left and right of the political divide.

Personal Life

Very little is known about Bezos‘ personal life as he zealously guards his privacy. However, a few significant relationships and events provide some perspective.

Jeff Bezos married MacKenzie Tuttle , a novelist he met while working at D.E Shaw in New York in 1993. She was one of the first employees at Amazon and supported him in the early risky days when the company operated out of their home garage. She served as an accountant for Amazon in addition to her own blossoming writing career.

They have four children together — three sons and an adopted daughter from China. After a trial separation in 2017, Bezos and MacKenzie divorced in 2019 which was finalized with a record $38 billion settlement. It was the largest such transfer in history which made MacKenzie Scott one of the wealthiest women in the world.

Within months, it was revealed that Bezos was in a relationship with former TV host Lauren Sanchez which allegedly caused the dissolution of his long marriage. Tabloids went abuzz with leaks of his intimate personal life in ensuing scandal. Bezos maintains a very private life outside his businesses and seldom makes media appearances.

Jeff‘s early childhood experiences and upbringing played a major role in molding his ambition and worldview.

His mother Jacklyn Bezos endured grave hardships as a single unwed teenage mom supporting Jeff alone in his infancy. Her perseverance through such adversity became a source of motivation for Bezos. In later years, his mom would tell him “You can do anything you set your mind to”.

Growing up, his migrant step father Miguel Bezos struggled through difficulty as a Cuban refugee building a new life in America. Facing discrimination, the elder Bezos displayed tremendous work ethic and grit to rise up the corporate ladder to become an engineer. This go-getter attitude clearly rubbed off on young Jeff.

Interesting Facts About Jeff Bezos

• Jeff Bezos is a major Star Trek fan and even had a cameo in 2016‘s Star Trek Beyond film
• He funded a 10,000 year clock dubbed the ‘Clock of Long Now‘ aimed at getting people thinking long term
• Each year, Bezos sells $1 billion of Amazon stock to fund space company Blue Origin
• In high school, he started an educational summer camp for students called the DREAM Institute
• By fourth grade, Bezos was spending summers fixing machines at his grandfather‘s ranch developing affinity for science

Net Worth & Recognition

As Amazon founder and CEO owning 16% of shares, Bezos has amassed vast wealth mainly through the phenomenal increase in the company‘s stock value. His current net worth overtakes the annual GDP of most nations on Earth!

With the tech boom over the last decade, Amazon (AMZN) share prices have surged astronomically. This caused Bezos‘ net worth to skyrocket making him the richest person in modern history.

• In 2018, Bezos was designated the "richest man in modern history" as his net worth grew to $150 billion outpacing Bill Gates
• In 2021, his wealth soared to a high of $210 billion when Amazon shares posted insane 95% annual gains thanks to pandemic tailwinds. This made him richest person ever after adjusting for inflation!
• As of May 2023, Jeff Bezos has a net worth estimated at $126.9 billion which still makes him the 3rd richest human behind luxury magnate Bernard Arnault and rival rocket man Elon Musk

For his revolutionary impact, Bezos has earned numerous accolades over the years including:

• Time Magazine Person of the Year in 1999
• U.S. National Medal of Technology in 2000
• Carnegie Mellon University Honorary Doctorate of Science in 2008
• U.S. Circumnavigation Certificate in 2010
• The New York Times Bestseller Author in 2011
• CEO of the Year Award 2013
• James Smithson Bicentennial Medal in 2016
• Axel Springer Award in 2018
• RFK Human Rights‘ Ripple of Hope Award in 2021

The empire Jeff Bezos spawned from his Seattle garage has made online retail into a trillion dollar industry while garnering over 200 million paying subscribers worldwide. But he believes his most creative years are ahead with space travel projects at Blue Origin.

Through continued risk taking and refusing to settle into status quo during moments of prior success, the possibilities remain boundless for this eternally wandering inventor.

Related posts:

• Is Jeff Bezos the Smartest Person Ever? Examining His IQ and Achievements
• Who Actually Invented Google and When? The Full, Fascinating History
• So, What Really Made Yelp Fail Spectacularly?
• Should Elon Musk Avoid Travel to Russia? Analyzing the Risks After Starlink‘s Role in Ukraine
• Larry Page: The Man Who Revolutionized Internet Search
• What Was Google Like in 1999? A Look Back at Google‘s Beginnings
• Demystifying Alphabet‘s Two Classes of Stock: A History
• Twitter vs Instagram in 2023: An Expert‘s In-Depth Feature and UX Comparison

Inside the life and career of Jeff Bezos, the tech CEO who founded Amazon

• Jeff Bezos began his career as a hedge-funder in New York before leaving to start Amazon .
• Amazon struggled to turn a profit at first, but is one of the world's biggest companies today.
• Along the way, Bezos has faced antitrust scrutiny, weathered scandals, traveled to space, and become one of the world's richest people.

Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable names in business.

The 59-year-old tech titan worked at a hedge fund before he left to start Amazon as an online bookseller, ultimately growing it into one of the world's largest companies by revenue. He's also founded space tourism company Blue Origin, which has flown him to the edge of space.

He's a fixture in the world's wealthiest list; currently, Bezos is the third-richest person in the world with a net worth of $158 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index .

With all of his wealth, Bezos has made some splashy purchases. He's the 24th-largest landowner in the US with 420,000 acres, according to the 2022 Land Report , with a real estate portfolio boasting mansions in Hawaii, California, Florida, and more. Bezos also owns the world's biggest sailing yacht , a 417-footer that cost an estimated $500 million.

From from his first job flipping burgers at McDonald's to building Amazon into a trillion-dollar company at one point, here's a look at Jeff Bezos' life and career. 

Allana Akhtar and Avery Hartmans contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

Jeff Bezos' mom, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him on January 12, 1964.

She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who later adopted Jeff.

Jeff didn't learn that Miguel, who often goes by Mike, wasn't his real father until he was 10 years old, but he told Wired he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.

In 1968, his mother told his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives.

When author Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his 2013 book "The Everything Store," Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.

From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers at his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.

Decades later, Bezos purchased his own land in Texas . His acreage is used as the launch site for Blue Origin rockets.

Bezos described his grandfather, Preston Gise, as an intelligent, quiet man who has been an inspiration to him. 

At a commencement address in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him "it's harder to be kind than clever."

Bezos' first job was cooking burgers at a McDonald's in Miami.

Bezos described the gig at McDonald's as "really hard" in a 2001 interview with Fast Company.

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers. This was my acned-teenager stage. They were like, 'Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'" Bezos said.

As a child, Bezos fell in love with reruns of the original "Star Trek" and became a fan of later versions too.

He even considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, a reference to a line from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, according to the book "The Everything Store." Bezos also considered naming Amazon Cadabra .

In 2016, Bezos even filmed a cameo in a "Star Trek" movie.

At his South Florida high school, Bezos said he wanted to be a "space entrepreneur."

Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age. When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed, according to an account in the book "The Everything Store."

In school, Bezos would tell teachers that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Of course, he's made that dream a reality: He now owns space exploration company Blue Origin.

To avoid spending a summer flipping burgers at McDonald's, Bezos and his high school girlfriend started a summer camp.

Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids, focused on science, math, and reading.

The camp had six kids who each paid $600 for the session — though two of them were Bezos' siblings. "The Lord of the Rings" series was required reading , and science lessons focused on fossil fuels and space.

In 2017, Amazon reportedly paid around $250 million to secure the rights to make a "Lord of the Rings" TV show, with Bezos himself said to be personally involved in the negotiations to land the deal. The company went on to spend an estimated $1 billion producing the first season of the show, making it one of the most expensive seasons of television ever.

Upon graduating high school in 1982, Bezos enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in computer science.

Upon graduation, he turned down job offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a telecommunications startup called Fitel, according to the book "The Everything Store."

After he quit Fitel, he went to Bankers Trust where he worked as a product manager.

While at Bankers Trust, Bezos focused on selling software pension-fund client.

He left Banker's Trust after two years for hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He became a senior vice president after only four years of working at D.E. Shaw . 

Meanwhile, Bezos was taking ballroom dancing classes as part of a scheme to increase what he called his "women flow."

The term was a play on Wall Street's "deal flow" and referred to the number of opportunities he had to meet women.

He ended up meeting his future wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at work.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was a D.E. Shaw research associate. The pair married in 1993 and they went on to have four kids together.

By 1994, Bezos's eye was on the internet, after reading about the web's immense growth in one year.

Bezos decided he needed to find some way to take advantage of its rapid growth. He made a list of 20 possible products to sell online and decided books were the best option, according to "The Everything Store" book. 

He decided to leave D.E. Shaw — a stable and lucrative job — in 1994 to start what would become Amazon.

His boss at the firm, David E. Shaw, tried to persuade Bezos to stay , but Bezos was already determined to start his own company.

MacKenzie and Jeff flew to Texas to borrow a car from his father, and then they drove to Seattle, which would become Amazon's headquarters.

Bezos was making revenue projections in the passenger seat the whole way, though the couple did stop to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Once they arrived, Bezos started Amazon.com in a garage.

He held most of his meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble — which would soon become a competitor.

In the early days, a bell would ring in the office every time someone made a purchase.

Amazon's employees would gather to see if anyone knew the customer.

But it took only a few weeks before it was ringing so often that the company put an end to the bell, according to the book "The Everything Store."

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and more than 45 different countries.

In 1997, less than three years after it was founded, Amazon went public on May 15.

More than 20 years after its IPO, Amazon now has a market cap of $1.4 trillion and is one of the world's five largest public companies.

When the dot-com crash came, analysts called the company "Amazon.bomb." But it weathered the storm.

The website ended up being one of the startups that wasn't wiped out.

Amazon has now gone beyond selling books to offering almost everything you can imagine.

The company has hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world and offers appliances, clothing, groceries, toiletries, and even cloud computing services.

In the early days, Bezos was said to be a demanding boss.

Bezos could explode at employees , and rumors circulated that he hired a leadership coach to help him tone it down. He also reportedly gave sarcastic responses when he was upset. 

At one point, Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.

Instead, Bezos required his staff to turn in papers on their proposals. This, he believed, would encourage critical thinking.

Bezos is also known for creating a frugal company culture.

This contrasts with other big tech firms, which offer free food and perks. 

Bezos told Business Insider in 2014 that Amazon did offer great amenities to its employees, but they just weren't the same as other tech companies. 

His time leading Amazon was not without controversy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon saw a surge in demand as more people were forced to shop online. But the company faced criticism over its treatment of workers , who said the company paid little attention to their health and safety at its fulfillment centers nationwide.

Amazon delivery drivers , who are contractors employed by third-party companies, have also spoken out about the demands of their jobs. Some drivers say Amazon's emphasis on metrics has forced them to use their delivery vans as bathrooms or sacrifice safety to deliver packages on time.

Amazon has faced antitrust concerns , particularly over its treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. Bezos and other tech CEOs were called to testify before Congress in 2020.

He's also gotten rich as an early investor in Google.

Bezos invested $250,000 in Google . That translated to 3.3 million shares when the company went public in 2004.

Today, that would be worth more than $400 million. Bezos hasn't said whether he kept any of his stock after the initial public offering.

Despite his high net worth , Bezos had the same annual base salary for decades while he was CEO: $81,840.

His annual total compensation for many years exceeded $1 million owing to costs related to security and business travel.

In July 2017, Bezos became the world's richest person for the first time.

He momentarily surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a net worth of more than $90 billion.

Today, Bezos is worth $157 billion, and he said he will give most of his wealth to charity.

Some of his more notable contributions include pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund , donating $200 million to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum , and pledging $100 million towards recovery efforts on Maui , where he owns a $78 million home, following the catastrophic wildfires.

But he's also spending his money on other business pursuits.

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

And he's spent an unknown amount on the private space tourism company Blue Origin.

The company made history in 2015 when it successfully launched a reusable rocket.

The rocket, called New Shepard, traveled to an altitude of 62 miles. 

Bezos' interest in flying has gotten him into trouble in the past.

In 2003, Bezos almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas while scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin.

Over the years, Bezos has also built quite the real estate portfolio.

He is the country's 24th largest landowner with 420,000 acres.

In January 2017, Bezos was revealed as the anonymous buyer of the Textile Museum in DC's Kalorama neighborhood.

The property sold for $23 million, and with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, it is the largest home in Washington, DC.

Bezos also owns five apartments at 212 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

His most recent purchase in the city was in 2021, when he paid a reported $23 million for a four-bedroom unit. He's spent a total of $119 million on apartments in the building.

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner Estate, a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills, California.

He purchased the property for $165 million , making it California's most expensive real estate transaction at the time. Bezos bought the mansion from David Geffen, who had purchased it in 1990 for $47.5 million.

In 2021, Bezos bought a home in Hawaii located in an isolated area on Maui's south shore near lava fields. Bezos' Maui home reportedly cost $78 million.

Most recently, Bezos scooped up a $68 million waterfront mansion in Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village.

The sale to Bezos was record-breaking on the island, which has also been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they were divorcing.

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Jeff and MacKenzie announced on Twitter they had finalized the terms of their divorce in April 2019.

MacKenzie, who changed her last name to Scott, retained more than $35 billion in Amazon stock , making her one of the world's richest women.

Scott, whose net worth is $36 billion, has donated at least $14.5 billion since 2019 , when she vowed to give away most of her fortune in her lifetime.

Shortly after they announced their divorce, news broke that Bezos was dating TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

At the time, the National Enquirer said it had obtained texts and explicit photos the couple had sent to each other. The publication also said at the time that it had "raunchy messages" between Bezos and Sanchez . 

Bezos immediately launched an investigation into who had leaked his personal messages.

Soon after, he dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post accusing National Enquirer publisher AMI of trying to blackmail him .

"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote.

Since then, Bezos and Sanchez have had a whirlwind few years.

The couple are often captured traveling around the world together . They've been spotted attending Wimbledon together, yachting with other moguls and celebrities, and vacationing in Saint-Tropez and St. Barths.

Throughout the summer, they've frequently been spotted on Bezos' new yacht.

The ship, which cost an estimated $500 million to build , is at 417 feet long and said to be the largest in the world. 

In May, multiple outlets reported that the pair had gotten engaged.

They marked the engagement with a  party in August attended by guests like Bill Gates and Kris Jenner.

In February 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon's CEO and transition to executive chairman after 27 years at the company's helm.

Bezos said that he planned to spend more time on philanthropy — including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund — as well as his two other major endeavors: The Washington Post and his rocket company, Blue Origin.

In July of 2021, he took an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft.

The trip marked his company's first human spaceflight .

He was accompanied by his brother, Mark; a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen ; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the '60s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.

Though Bezos remains the third-richest person in the world today, his wealth took a tumble last year.

In Forbes' annual ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, Bezos came out as the biggest loser: His net worth fell $57 billion from March 2022 to March 2023, but still sat at a cool $114 billion at the time.

Amazon's stock fell 50% in 2022, and it became the first public company to ever lose $1 trillion in market value . Don't feel too bad for him — with Amazon's stock bouncing back this year, Bezos' wallet has largely recovered.

• Main content

Jeff Bezos biography: The salary and career history of Amazon's CEO

The lowdown on Jeff Bezos' salary, net worth, education and career history

Jeff Bezos is one the most powerful men in the technology industry. He is the founder and CEO of online retail giant Amazon.com and acquired The Washington Post paper in 2013. Bezos has led the company since its founding in 1994 to spectacular growth and power within the industry.

Amazon is a giant but what about the man behind it? How did Jeff Bezos turn a home-grown outfit running out of his garage into the largest online retailer in America?

Full name: Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos

Age: 50 (12 January, 1964)

Nationality: US

Net Worth: $32.3 billion (July 2014)

Salary: $81,840, making him one of the lowest-paid CEOs in America

Get the ITPro. daily newsletter

Receive our latest news, industry updates, featured resources and more. Sign up today to receive our FREE report on AI cyber crime & security - newly updated for 2024.

Education: Bachelor's degree of science and engineering in electrical engineering and computer science

Best known for: Being a technology entrepreneur and Amazon founder and CEO

Current role: CEO of Amazon

Career history: Bezos worked on Wall Street for eight years after graduating from Princeton.

The bankers were impressed. "Bezos was unusual not only for his balanced intellecthe could handle complex logic as well as articulate his thinkingbut also for the overall package: smart, creative, personable," according to profile in Time.

However, he left for Seattle after hearing about rising internet use and a Supreme Court ruling that online retailers did not have to pay sales tax in states where they are not physically present.

It was a bold move from someone with a good job at a hedge fund, but he realised he would rather try something bold and fail while the internet was young than miss out.

He gathered some start-up cash from family and friends and started Amazon out of his garage. His "pathologically happy and infectiously enthusiastic attitude" won support from employees.

The company began as a bookseller in 1995. By 1996, it was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. It survived the dotcom bubble and 20 years of competitive rivalry to gain its current position.

Bezos never paid himself well. Even to this day, his annual cash salary isn't even six figures. However, his 87 million shares of Amazon (19 per cent) make him a billionaire.

But, like most technology entrepreneurs, Bezos isn't focused on just one thing. In 2000, he created human spaceflight start-up Blue Origin with the aim of helping "anybody to go into space." A well kept secret for a number of years, he only went public in 2006 and, in 2013, he was reported to be in space travel discussions with Sir Richard Branson of Virgin.

Also in 2013, Bezos (rather than Amazon) acquired The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million.

Interesting fact(s): Bezos' low salary is only 14,000 more than the average Facebook intern, according to Business Insider .

Having always had an interest in science, as a boy he created an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his bedroom. Clever as that was, it doesn't top the fact he used a screwdriver to dismantle his crib as a toddler, according to Achievement.org .

ExtraHop appoints Christine Camp to lead new channel partner program

Avanade appoints new Center of AI sales and cross solution lead for UK&I

Windows 11 Pro and CDW - Overcoming today's escalating cyberthreats

Most Popular

Innovation in product development

Serious about sustainability?

Onward: How security drives business opportunity

The language of innovation

• 2 Google set to lay off its entire Python team - reports
• 3 How TUI rapidly scaled its generative AI integration through Amazon Bedrock
• 4 UK universities are facing an onslaught of cyber threats — here's why
• 5 Darktrace acquisition dents UK prestige

Jeff Bezos biography

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964). His birth name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Businessman and founder and CEO of Amazon. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. His mother, Jacklyn Gise, had him as a teenager and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, left them as soon as he heard the news. Years later his mother married Miguel Bezos a Cuban. Now, Miguel adopted Jeffrey and he received his last name. The family moved to Houston, Texas. Jeffrey Bezos studied at River Oaks Elementary, he was always a very smart and witty little boy.

They moved to Miami, where he studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School. And upon graduating he entered Princeton University to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, his thesis was cum laude. In 1996, he started working in a fiber optic company, FITEL, where he was responsible for the development of computer systems, his performance was so good that he became vice president. After moving to New York with the idea of ​​entering the world of finance, in Bankers Trust, he also held the position of vice president in 1990. In the following four years, Bezos worked with another Wall Street company: D.E. Shaw and Co.

Bezos realized that the purchase/sale of products and services on the internet or other electronic means would be a great field to explore and exploit. For this reason, he founded the electronic commerce company Amazon in 1995. Its service was something new for the netizens, which produced an increase in the visits quickly. Only in the first month of operation had books been sold in all corners of the United States. Months later it reached 2,000 daily visitors, a figure that would multiply abysmally in the next year. In 1997, the success made Amazon become one of the most important companies online.

Bezos had managed to conquer the internet business. Encouraged by the reception of consumers, he undertook the diversification of products, including CD and DVD media and electronic devices. As demand increased, this ingenious man included new products to his virtual store. The growth and its popularity were such that today it distributes from food to home, clothes and shoes, video games and music, to toilet paper and diapers. Amazon has experimented with the lucrative benefit of advertising since it gives the possibility to companies to advertise their products and mark them as featured products.

Bezos established independent Amazon websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Austria, France, China, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, India and Mexico, the variety of products can be several in each country. Currently, the services are enjoyed by companies such as Target Corporation, Marks & Spencer, the NBA, Sears Canada, Timex or Bombay Company. The AOL online sales service also supports. In 2007, Bezos shook the world with the creation and launch of Amazon’s alter ego: Amazon Kindle, a device specially designed for the visualization of electronic books. Amazon Kindle was launched for the first time in North America and is currently available in 45 countries.

In 2011, The Economist awarded Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. The following year, Bezos was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Fortune. It is part of the Bilderberg Group. Bezos has given several conferences in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and participated in the conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council in 2011 and 2012. In 2018, he appeared on the Forbes list, where a net wealth of 106 billion dollars was estimated. He has also received other awards as the best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. Jeff Bezos has also been on Fortune’s list of the 50 best leaders in the world. In September 2016, he was awarded the Heinlein Prize for advances in Space Marketing. He donated the prize money to the international student organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space by Bezos.

Since 2017, he has seen an increase in Amazon shares. They went up more than 130%, which made him have a profit of more than 100 billion dollars, after this, he returned to be the richest person in the world. He was named Person of the Year in Time magazine and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Really, the awards and awards have been impressive. Much of this is because Bezos, started in the field of journalism, looking beyond its commercial horizons; beyond the web. Bezos entered the world of media, acquiring the traditional newspaper The Washington Post for the sum of 250 thousand dollars.

You may like

Robert Oppenheimer

Paris Hilton

Tina Turner

Nicki Minaj

History of Salsa

Nipsey Hussle

Nipsey Hussle Biography

Ermias Asghedom (August 15, 1985 – March 31, 2019), better known as Nipsey Hussle, was an American rapper, businessman, and community activist, who rose to fame in 2018 with his debut album Victory Lab . Nipsey began his career towards the mid-2000s releasing several successful mixtapes such as Slauson Boy Volume 1, Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series and The Marathon. His fame came to him, along with his first Grammy nomination, with his debut album in 2018. He had previously created his label All Money In No Money Out (2010).

Following his death, he received two posthumous Grammys for the songs Racks in the Middle and Higher. He was known for his social work on behalf of the Crenshaw community.

Early years

He was born in Los Angeles, United States, on August 15, 1985 . Son of Angelique Smith and Eritrean immigrant Dawit Asghedom, he grew up in Crenshaw, a neighborhood located south of Los Angeles, with his siblings Samiel and Samantha. He attended Hamilton High School but dropped out before graduating. Since he was little he looked for a way to help around the home, so over time, he began to work selling different products on the street.

After leaving school he became involved in the world of gangs, however, he turned away from it when he realized that it was not what he expected for his future. Decided then to dedicate himself to music, he sold everything that linked him to the gangs and worked for a time to buy his own production tools. After finishing his studies, he began to write and produce his own mixtapes, which he sold from a car. After finding inspiration from a trip he took to Eritrea with his father and spending time in prison, Nipsey turned fully to his career and business. He always looked for ways to start and help the community in which he grew up: giving jobs, helping students, renovating public spaces, etc …

Community activist

Nipsey was admired for his work at Crenshaw because instead of moving or investing in hedge funds, he preferred to help the community by boosting the local economy.

In late 2005, Nipsey Hussle released his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Volume 1, independently, to great local success. By then he already had a fan base at the regional level, so it took him a while to sign a contract with the Epic Records and Cinematic Music Group labels. Later, the first volumes of the Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series appeared, with which he expanded his popularity. Burner on My Lap, Ridin Slow, Aint No Black Superman, Hussle in the House and It’s Hard out Here , were some of the songs included in the series.

By 2009, Nipsey would make a name for himself collaborating with Drake on Killer and with Snoop Dog on Upside Down. He also released Bullets Ain’t Got No Name vol.3 and in 2010, he left Epic and opened his own label All Money In No Money Out. Under this label, he would soon release The Marathon, a mixtape in which hits such as Love ?, Mr. Untouchable, Young Rich and Famous and Late Nights and Early Mornings appeared. He also created The Marathon Clothing at that time, a sports and casual clothing brand that was based in his neighborhood. He then released the mixtape The Marathon Continues (2011), participated in the We Are the World 25 for Haiti campaign, and was featured in the popular XXL Magazine Annual Freshman Top Ten.

In 2013 came Crenshaw , a mixtape that would become famous because Jay-Z himself bought 100 copies for $ 100 each.

Victory Lap

After many delays, Nipsey would release his long-awaited debut album Victory Lap , on February 16, 2018, to great success. It was praised by critics and received a Grammy nomination for best rap album of the year. It was such a success that many singles entered the Billboard and Itunes charts. However, Nipsey did not enjoy much fame.

Hussle was assassinated on March 31, 2019, outside his store in South Los Angeles. He was shot multiple times by a man he had previously clashed with, he was arrested and charged with murder on April 2 of the same year. After his death, many personalities expressed the pain caused by the news. It is worth mentioning that the Mayor of Los Angeles himself gave his condolences to the family, recognizing Hussle’s social work in Crenshaw.

He was the partner of actress Lauren London and was the father of two children.

Sales strategies and greatest hits

Hussle was known for his sales strategies, since, he used to upload his singles in free download and then sell some limited editions for a cost of 100 to 1000 dollars . It promoted the sale of his work with campaigns such as Proud2Pay and Mailbox Money, in which he gave special incentives (autographed photos, dedication calls, tickets to his studio, and special events) to buyers. His revolutionary ideas promised him a fruitful career.

Some of his greatest hits

• Rose Clique
• Forever On My Fly Shit
• Thas Wat Hoes Do Proud of That (with Rick Ross)
• Face the world
• Bless, 1 of 1
• Where Yo Money At
• Fuck Donald Trump
• Young Rich and Famous

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa Biography

James Riddle Hoffa (February 14, 1913 – July 30, 1975), better known as Jimmy Hoffa, was an American union activist. A reference to the working class of the 20th century, Hoffa began his union activity at the age of 18 within the trucker union. With time, he was gaining importance and enemies. He mixed with the mob and was the leader of the most important union organization in the U.S.A ., the International Brotherhood of Truckers. His actions took a toll on him and in 1967 he was arrested for bribery. In 1975, he disappeared after having dinner at a Detroit restaurant. To date, it is unknown what happened or where his body is. His disappearance was portrayed in Scorsese’s The Irishman .

He was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. James was the son of John Hoffa and Viola Riddle. His father passed away when he was 7 years old, of Irish descent and working as a miner. When the dad died, the family moved to Detroit, where Hoffa lived the rest of his life. He studied until he was 14 years old and began working as a teenager, to help the family. At the age of 18, he began to participate in the union demonstrations of the truck driver’s union, and over time he gained recognition. However, Hoffa had never driven a truck.

Jimmy Hoffa, the truckers, and the mob

Despite his clear inexperience, Hoffa managed to earn the respect of all road workers thanks to his charisma and effective acting. He was thus elected president of the famous International Brotherhood of Truckers or “Teamsters” in 1957. From then on he would be known for his aggressive methods and connections with the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia). It is known that Jimmy used the mob to gain notoriety and destroy his competitors, while the union served as a front to clean up dirty money from the mob.

As time went by, his relationship with Cosa Nostra became increasingly evident, becoming the target of various investigations (fraud, conspiracy, evasion, extortion, laundering…). Behind them was the prosecutor Robert Kennedy, who later became a solicitor, his sole objective being the capture of Hoffa. Although he managed to leave the courts unscathed on several occasions – thanks to his intimidation and bribery strategies – he was finally locked up in 1967.

Hoffa had faced justice several times, so the confinement did not scare him, he planned to continue running the union and all its businesses from jail, leaving someone manageable in command. But this did not turn out as he expected, his puppet rebelled and the mafia took advantage of his confinement to expand their business with more facilities. It was clear that everyone was better off without Hoffa at the helm.

The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

In 1971 his sentence was commuted and Hoffa returned to work, he tried to regain his place and strength, but had little luck, because the mafia was clear that the business was better without him. The day he arrived, on July 30, 1975, he was summoned by Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, two gangster bosses who were tired of his instance. They summoned him to a restaurant in Detroit, but never showed up, Hoffa waited for more than an hour and then got into a car, disappearing ever since. Nobody saw him again.

Jimmy was powerful, but he had made many enemies and was in the crosshairs of the mob, making his disappearance one of the most famous of the 20th century. His body was never found and in 1982 he was presumed dead. Although over time many took credit for his disappearance (and his death) from him, little is known for sure.

One of the possible culprits is perhaps Frank Sheeran, the Irishman , Hoffa’s henchman, who, pressured by the gangsters, would have killed the union leader. According to Sheeran’s version, that day he would have taken Hoffa to a house, where he shot him three times, and then moved his body to a still uncertain place.

His body and his disappearance became one of the best-known mysteries of the time . To date, the fate of his body is unknown. Many say it is buried, others that it was dismembered and thrown into a river, and others that it was compacted. There were many complaints about the discovery of his body, but all false.

His legacy was continued by his son, the current head of the International Brotherhood of Truckers, James P. Hoffa.

He was married to Josephine Poszywak and was the father of James P. Hoffa and Barbara Ann Crancer.

On July 30, 1982, he was declared legally dead.

Scorsese’s The Irishman

Scorsese’s The Irishman premiered on Netflix in 2019. The film follows Hoffa’s hitman and right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, as he thus narrates his story and participation in the disappearance of Hoffa. In the film, Hoffa is played by Al Pacino , while Sheeran and the prosecutor Kennedy are played by Robert De Niro and Jack Huston.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Elon Musk biography

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28th of June of 1972 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is known for being one of the founders of Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAl, and Hyperloop, among other companies. The entrepreneur and inventor appears in the list of the richest in the world, occupying the position number 56, in 2017, with 17.4 billion dollars. Forbes magazine, for the December 2016 publication, named him the 21st person with the most power in the world. His greatest goal, according to Musk, is to change humanity drastically; for this purpose, he works in SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla. One of his interests is the abandonment of petroleum fuels in order to reduce global warming. Perhaps Elon’s most ambitious project, so far, is the establishment of a human colony on Mars, with nearly a million people.

He spent his childhood in South Africa with his parents, an engineer from South Africa and a nutritionist from Canada. At age 10, with his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, he began to learn to programme on his own. Two years later he sold his first videogame called Blastar for about $ 200. At that time he went through difficult times; his schoolmates subjected him to bullying because of his uncommon interests for them. Elon spent his money on science fiction books, comics, and video games.

In the period between 12 and 15 years of age, he entered into an existential crisis influenced by the readings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The situation went to the extreme of taking him to the hospital because of beatings by his companions. In his home things were not better, the relationship with his father was quite complicated. He suffered the emotional violence of a father unable to understand him. Compulsory military service bothered him. For these reasons, at age 17, after graduating from high school in Pretoria, he decided to leave South Africa and take refuge with his mother in Canada.

What Musk wanted most was to reach the United States. He found in that country a way to make possible everything he imagined. Elon’s father conditioned his support: he would not pay for a university outside of South Africa. In 1989, while in Canada, he found a chance to study thanks to his maternal relatives, who came from North America. By 1992, Elon counted on a scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania. The young entrepreneur began his studies in Business Administration, in parallel he began his career in Physics. He was fortunate to have the support of one of his teachers, who turned out to be the executive director of Los Gatos, a company located in the southern part of San Francisco Bay, California. The experience gained on ultracapacitors in that company, and then in Pinnacle Research, along with the inspiration it had for inventors such as Nikola Tesla, made him define the fields in which he would focus on the future: renewable energy, the Internet and outer space.

The beginning on the Internet began with Zip2, in 1995, along with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend named Greg Curry. The company was dedicated to the development and maintenance of web pages dedicated to the media. The idea was a success, managing around 200 sites on the Internet in the year of 1999. For that year the company was sold to Compaq for 300 million dollars; money that would help him found X.com. The next plan was to systematize payments and money management through the Internet, offering security and speed. The ease offered by X.com and security made the project a very profitable idea, as well as merging, in 2000, with Confinity; company that provided a similar service, but only between Palm Pilot devices. In 2001 X.com decided to change its name to Paypal.inc a well-known company that provides the service to make online payments internationally.

With the growing success, problems soon appeared. Different companies tried to close Paypal, including eBay, which ended up buying it in October 2002, for 1.5 billion dollars. The sale of Paypal gave way to the creation, by its former members, of companies such as LinkedIn and YouTube. The next Musk project was called Tesla Motors, the company that created the first functional electric car. The main investment in Tesla was solar energy. The idea was born in 2003 in the company AC Propulsion, which had a prototype electric car. Musk wanted to help design a sports car with the same base of AC Propulsion.

In 2004, along with Matt Tappenhig and Martin Eberhard, Tesla Motors was created, with the intention of mass producing the model T-Zero of AC Propulsion. Musk invested nearly 98% of the capital. The start of the company was hard; the budget for the first models exceeded what was expected, but they managed to sell enough to continue developing models. For 2012, 2100 Tesla Roadster was sold in different countries. In 2015 the Tesla Model X was launched, designed to cover all types of terrain.

Another of Musk’s three projects involves SpaceX. Thinking of establishing a colony on Mars, he began, in 2002, to investigate how to send a rocket to Mars. His initial idea was to obtain reusable rockets to carry out the two trips for reconnaissance missions. For that year, Space Exploration Technologies was founded, focused on launching rockets and reducing fuel costs and materials for launch with increases in viability. In 2008, an agreement was made between NASA for twelve rocket flights. Currently, SpaceX is responsible for the development of Falcon rockets, which use liquid fuel.

Henry Gantt

Henry Gantt Biography

Henry Laurence Gantt (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) industrial engineer . He was born in Calvert County, Maryland, United States. During his childhood and youth, he and his family lived devastating moments, especially in the economic part. His parents owned crops in Calvert but remained in ruins after the devastation caused during the Civil War. After that political and social event, they did not overlap economically so they had to live various hardships.

In spite of this, his parents did everything possible so that the young Gantt finished his school training at McDonogh School in 1878 and went to Johns Hopkins University to study industrial engineering. His performance was very good, when he graduated he started working as a teacher and draftsman, Gantt had a great skill for drawing since he was a kid. Then he studied mechanical engineering at the same university. In 1887, he was hired in Frederick W. Taylor to carry out an application of the principles of the Scientific Administration with his work in Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel, he carried out this work until 1893. In his career as a consultant, he invented the Gantt diagram.

Later, he designed some systems to measure the efficiency and productivity of workers, such as task bonds and the payment system and other methods that facilitate this process. This diagram became very popular for its simplicity, performance, and quality at that time, as well as at this time, pointed out the various tasks to be performed in a horizontal timeline, it has been used as a tool in operations that require strict temporal planning. However, Henry Gantt’s studies focused on the analysis of the performance of work methods, which depends on his judgment of the willingness to use the correct methods and skills.

Gantt was very concerned about leaving his knowledge embodied in paper, therefore, in 1908 presented before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the text: Training of workers in habits of diligence and collaboration, in which he exposed the need to change the employer’s tactics; it is not a way of acting in the place, in the techniques, in the work, in the information, in the habits, in the possibilities, in the efficiency and in the efficiency of his work. As a complement to this, it is a bonus system that has been added to work and work done in a standardized time standard.

With these measures we tried to raise, not only the quantity, but above all the quality of work, following Taylor’s theory, the so-called common prosperity theory: what he says is that the worker has a kind of personal satisfaction to do the job well, this generates a feeling of pride that will make you try harder. For his part, the employer will notice an increase in productivity and the sum of a reduction in labor disputes. This is exposed with mastery in work, wages, and benefits (1913).

In the field of administration, his most known contribution is the graph of the bars such as the chart or the Gantt chart, which is composed in a diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the units of time, and in the vertical is recorded the different functions, which are represented by horizontal bars. With the help of this engineer, companies and the discipline of business administration is very broad, some of them are: the Gantt diagram, the development of the concept of industrial efficiency, the implementation of the system of Bonds of Tasks, with this adopted the premium to the workers. And he also implemented the Daily Balance Chart.

It was also very emphatic to ensure that companies have a social responsibility, in their opinion, companies have obligations for the welfare of society. His support for the scientific organization of work is also highlighted. When he worked for Frederick W. Taylor, with whom he collaborated in the application of his own doctrine to improve productivity, and in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution .

After 14 years of being at Taylor’s side, he made the decision to separate from this because his interest was the humanization of industrial practices and the dehumanized theories of Frederick Taylor . Unfortunately, in his last years of life, Gantt did not have the opportunity to finish several of his projects because his health was undermined. Finally, Henry Gantt died on November 23, 1919, in the town of Pine Island in New York .

His importance lies in the fact that it is the founder of scientific administration , an activity developed in the United States that later spread throughout the world with the idea of ​​achieving humanization, rationalization, and performance.

Related Content: Industrial Engineering

Celebrities

Nicola Porcella

Nicola Porcella Biography Nicola Emilio Porcella Solimano (February 5, 1988), better known as Nicola Porcella, is an actor and TV...

Wendy Guevara

Wendy Guevara Biography Wendy Guevara Venegas (August 12, 1993), better known as Wendy Guevara, is an influencer, actress, singer, and...

Paris Hilton Biography Paris Whitney Hilton (February 17, 1981), better known as Paris Hilton, is a socialite, businesswoman, model, DJ,...

Leonardo DiCaprio

Biography of Leonardo DiCaprio Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is a renowned actor and film producer who has won numerous awards within...

Denzel Washington

Biography of Denzel Washington Denzel Washington is an African American actor born on December 28, 1954 in Mount Vernon, New...

Ryan Reynolds

Biography of Ryan Reynolds Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born on October 23, 1976 in Vancouver, Canada, and he is a...

Biography of Brad Pitt William Bradley Pitt, better known as Brad Pitt, was born on December 18, 1963 in Shawnee,...

Entrepreneurs

Luciano Benetton

Luciano Benetton Biography Luciano Benetton (May 13, 1935) Born in Ponzano, Treviso, Italy. An Italian businessman and fashion designer, co-founder...

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton Biography Louis Vuitton (August 4, 1821 – February 25, 1892) businessman and fashion designer. Founder of the leather...

Peter Drucker biography Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born...

Paul Allen biography Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953) entrepreneur, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in Seattle,...

Nik Powell biography Nik Powell (November 4, 1950) businessman and co-founder of the Virgin Group. He was born in Great...

Most Popular

Henri Fayol

Walt Disney

Taiichi Ohno

Philip B. Crosby

Kaoru Ishikawa

Ariana Grande

Adolf Hitler

Jeff Bezos: Short Personal History & Biography

Jeff Bezos is quite a business legend. He founded and raised Amazon from a small book shop to a titan of the retail and digital industries.

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, the creator of the space exploration firm Blue Origin, and the founder and former CEO of the e-commerce corporation Amazon. Thanks to his prosperous business endeavors, he is one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964. While being really young he developed an interest in computers and later on attended Princeton University to study computer science and electrical engineering.

He worked on Wall Street after graduating, and in 1990 he was appointed as the youngest senior vice president at the financial company D.E. Shaw.

Four years later, Bezos resigned from his well-paying position to launch Amazon.com, an online bookshop that became one of the most prominent success stories on the Internet.

Quickly enough, Amazon started to sell a lot of goods that were not just related to books. The major acquisitions of Jeff Bezos are Washington Post in 2013 and Whole Foods in 2017.

Not so long ago, Amazon announced that Bezos would step down as CEO, and as of now, he doesn't own that position anymore and has most likely shifted his attention to other projects. We think the majority of it is aimed at the Blue Origin project .

Article Shortcuts

Early years, finance career, amazon creation, acquisition of whole foods, acquisition of washington post, blue origin project, charity and non-profit, personal life.

Jackie Bezos, Jeff Bezos' mother, was a teenager when she gave birth to him on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bezos's original parents had been married for less than a year. In a short while, Bezos' mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, when Jeff was four years old.

As a kid, Bezos was fascinated by how things worked, converting his parents' garage into a laboratory and installing electrical contraptions surrounding his house.

In school, Jeff showed great interest in space-related classes and confidently claimed that the future of mankind is beyond Earth . That was also a time when he started his first business endeavor . It was a summer camp for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders called the "Dream Institute."

It was educational in purpose and the kids that attended it were offered quite a lot of literature to handle.

“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”

Bezos eventually attended Princeton University, where he studied computer science . After graduating, he shunned employment offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a startup named Fitel.

After leaving Fitel, Bezos considered launching a startup that would send news by fax alongside Halsey Minor, who would eventually form CNET.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked at many Wall Street businesses, including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment company D.E. Shaw . He became D.E. Shaw's youngest vice president ever in 1990 after four years of hard work.

Bezos learned in 1994 that the Internet had expanded by 2,300% in one year. This number surprised him, and he decided he wanted to figure out how to capitalize on its rapid development.

He produced a list of 20 potential internet items to sell through the web and determined that books were the best option.

“If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”

Despite having a terrific position, Bezos opted to quit D.E. Shaw. David E. Shaw, his boss at the business, sought to persuade Bezos to stay. But Bezos was already set on starting his own business; he thought it was better to attempt and fail at a startup than never try at all .

Amazon.com was born as a company on July 16, 1995, and named after one of the world's greatest rivers. Bezos invited 300 friends to beta test his site before the launch.

Several employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage in the months preceding the launch, eventually expanding operations into a two-bedroom house outfitted with three Sun Microstations.

The company's first success was phenomenal. Amazon.com started operating and selling books across the United States and 45 countries in 30 days with no press advertising.

In two months, sales hit $20,000 weekly, far quicker than Bezos and his startup team had anticipated.

Bezos began to broaden Amazon's services by selling CDs and films in 1998, followed by clothing, electronics, toys, and other items through large retail partnerships.

While many dot.coms failed in the early 1990s, Amazon thrived, with annual revenues increasing from around $500,000 in 1995 to something over $17 billion in 2011.

Bezos stated in his 2018 annual shareholder letter that the business had reached 100 million paying customers for Amazon Prime. Amazon was valued at over $1 trillion by September 2018, making it the second firm in history to do so, just a few weeks after Apple.

Amazon.com debuted its video service in early 2006 . It changed its name from Amazon Unbox on TiVo to Amazon Instant Video after relaunching.

In 2007, Amazon unveiled the Kindle, a portable digital book reader that allowed customers to buy, download, read, and save their book selections.

With the opening of Amazon Studios in 2013 , Bezos debuted numerous original series. The critically praised Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle were the company's breakout hits in 2014.

Bezos attracted attention in early December 2013 when he introduced a new, experimental Amazon effort dubbed "Amazon Prime Air," which uses drones to provide delivery services to consumers.

He stated that these drones would be capable of carrying things weighing up to five pounds and flying within a 10-mile radius of the company's distribution hub.

On December 7, 2016, the first Prime Air delivery was conducted in Cambridge, England.

When Amazon debuted the Fire Phone in 2014 , Bezos supervised one of the company's few significant flops. It was withdrawn the following year after being criticized for being overly gimmicky.

Amazon officially bought Whole Foods in August 2017 for $13.7 billion. Customers who are Amazon Prime members may get 10% off sale pricing, and there will be certain Amazon-branded items available in shops, including popular tech devices like the Amazon Echo range.

Depending on the market, the business began giving Amazon Prime members grocery delivery in as little as two hours. As a result, Walmart and Kroger started to provide food delivery to their consumers.

“People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.”

Many believe that Amazon purchased and operated Whole Foods to learn about the supermarket industry and then utilize that information to create a larger, more mainstream grocery chain.

The corporation appears to be taking its first moves in that direction, with new Amazon Fresh outlets opening around the country.

The COVID epidemic redirected the industry's attention to food delivery, which benefited Amazon even more . And now, those in the grocery industry, Wall Street, and the general public are all intrigued about Amazon's supermarket ambitions, given the company's penchant for wrecking whatever sector it enters.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos created global news when he paid $250 million for The Washington Post and other media linked with its parent firm, The Washington Post Co.

Citation from letter to Washington Post employees from Bezos:

"The values of The Post do not need changing. ...There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That's essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs."

Bezos employed hundreds of reporters and editors and quadrupled the paper's technology team. The organization boasts a number of scoops, including the revelation that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn lied about his communication with Russians, prompting his resignation.

The organization declared itself profitable in 2016 . The following year, the Post's ad sales surpassed $100 million, with three consecutive years of double-digit revenue growth. According to ComScore, Amazon quickly surpassed The New York Times digital in terms of unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019.

Bezos launched Blue Origin in 2000, an aerospace business that researches technology to reduce the cost of space travel so that it is affordable to paying consumers. The firm ran quietly for almost a decade and a half.

Bezos welcomed reporters to his headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle, in 2016. He painted a picture of people not just visiting but someday conquering space. Bezos stated in 2017 that he would sell around $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to support Blue Origin .

(null) (null)

“We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen.” Jeff Bezos

Two years later, he unveiled the Blue Origin lunar lander and said the business was testing its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would transport visitors into space for a few minutes.

Blue Origin was one of 13 companies chosen by NASA in August 2019 to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is working on a safe and precise lunar landing mechanism and engine nozzles for liquid-fueled rockets.

In addition, the business is collaborating with NASA to develop and launch reusable rockets from a rebuilt complex near NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Healthcare Venture

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase issued a joint press statement on January 30, 2018, announcing plans to merge their resources to develop a new healthcare firm for their U.S. workers.

According to the statement, the firm will be "free from profit-making motivations and restraints." At the same time, it seeks methods to reduce costs and improve patient happiness, with an initial focus on technological solutions.

“Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

"The healthcare system is complex, and we enter this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty. Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort."

Bezos Earth Fund

Bezos announced the establishment of the Bezos Earth Fund on February 17, 2020, to tackle the potentially disastrous impacts of climate change .

Bezos said he will start distributing grants and assist "scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

Bezos Day One Fund

In 2018, Bezos launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on "funding existing non-profits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, non-profit tier-one preschools in low-income communities."

Bezos made the statement a year after asking his Twitter followers how they might contribute a portion of his money.

Before their divorce, Bezos formed the charity with his ex-wife MacKenzie and donated $2 billion of his own fortune to support it . Bezos, one of the world's wealthiest individuals, had previously been publicly chastised for his lack of humanitarian initiatives.

Other Noticeable Donations

He gave $2.5 million to protect homosexual marriage in Washington in 2012. He has lately offered $10 billion to combat climate change, contributed $200 million to the Smithsonian, and given $100 million to the Obama Foundation, chef Jose Andres, and campaigner Van Jones.

Bezos has also contributed $42 million and a portion of his Texas acreage to developing the device called The Clock Of The Long Now, an underground clock expected to last 10,000 years.

We don't want to chase gossip around such sensitive matters as personal life, so we will only share publicly known and proven facts about Jeff Bezos.

Bezos met his future wife, MacKenzie Tuttle, while both were working at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills for her writing career. The pair dated for three months before getting engaged and marrying in 1993.

“I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.”

MacKenzie was a crucial figure in creating and developing Amazon, building the company's first business plan, and working as the company's first accountant.

Despite her modest and scholarly demeanor, she openly backed Amazon and her husband. MacKenzie, a novelist by trade who studied under Toni Morrison at Princeton University, released her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright, in 2005 and her second novel, Traps, in 2013.

Bezos and MacKenzie split in 2019 after more than 25 years of marriage. Bezos' interest in Amazon was reduced from 16 percent to 12 percent as part of the divorce settlement, placing his stake at roughly $110 billion and MacKenzie's at more than $37 billion.

MacKenzie declared her intention to donate at least half of her fortune to charity .

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Bezos and MacKenzie have four children: three sons and a Chinese-adopted daughter.

After 27 years at the helm, Bezos announced his resignation as CEO of Amazon and transferred to executive chairman on February 2, 2021.

Bezos stated that he intended to devote more attention to philanthropy, including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund , as well as his two other significant businesses, The Washington Post and Blue Origin.

Bezos stepped down in July and started on his next adventure: an 11-minute journey to the edge of space on a Blue Origin spaceship on July 20.

He was joined by his brother, Mark, a Dutch adolescent named Oliver Daemen, and Wally Funk , an 82-year-old aviator who prepared to travel to space in the 1960s but was refused because she was a woman.

And that's it so far, we hope you found this article insightful :)

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to be notified of new content on marketsplash..

Advertisement

Supported by

To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos

• Share full article

• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Ben Smith

• Published May 13, 2021 Updated June 17, 2021

AMAZON UNBOUND Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire By Brad Stone

After I finished “Amazon Unbound,” I glanced at the sleek black Amazon Echo cylinder sitting on my kitchen counter, right next to a few cans of dog food that had just arrived from Amazon. Instead of the device, I imagined before me the equally sleek, smoothly bald and evenly tanned face of Jeff Bezos himself, eyes peering serenely back at me from below the glowing LED halo.

That minor hallucination made a kind of sense because — as we learn from Brad Stone’s new portrait of Amazon and its founder — Alexa, the voice coming out of my Echo, more or less is Jeff Bezos. He came up with the idea of a smart speaker in January 2011, back in the era of Google Plus and the iPod Shuffle. Bezos emailed his top deputies that month and declared, “We should build a $20 device with its brains in the cloud that’s completely controlled by our voice.”

For the next nearly four years, he obsessively micromanaged the project, pushing teams in Atlanta and Gdansk to make speech recognition seamless. He put in place a surreal testing protocol that involved hiring temps to spend days in empty apartments chattering away to silent speakers, and berated executives who told him it would take decades to develop speech recognition. He took home an early Echo prototype and when, in a moment of frustration, he told it to go “shoot yourself in the head,” it sent a wave of panic through the engineers who were listening in. He even came up with the idea for the LED ring on top, Stone writes, and with the name “Alexa” (in homage to the ancient library of Alexandria).

Stone’s new volume is on its surface a business book that seeks to explain the rise of America’s most important private enterprise, a giant company also notable for its opacity. In that sense, it is a sequel of sorts to his 2013 best seller, “The Everything Store,” which introduced Bezos and explained his relentless and single-minded drive to take over online commerce. “Amazon Unbound” is particularly valuable in explaining how the company makes money, and the day-to-day decisions that end up having a big effect on consumers: Is it worth it, for example, to sell pallets of bottled water, with their low cost and expensive shipping?

Stone looks at turning points in Amazon’s history, like the failure of the Fire phone and the rise of Amazon Web Services, its internet hosting division, as the engine of the company’s financial success. This is the inside story, a kind of corollary to the outside one Alec MacGillis recently sketched in “Fulfillment,” his grim look at how the country has become atomized by Amazon’s economic model. I was, though, left wishing at times for a third book that made a tighter connection between the inside of the juggernaut and its effects on the world.

“Amazon Unbound” shows how the company increasingly wields its enormous scale against potential rivals. After acquiring a key robot manufacturer, for instance, it stopped shipping the machines to competitors. And it used its vast trove of data from third-party Amazon vendors to make competing “private label” products, then simply lied about it.

Significantly, the book is also very much a biography of Bezos. And that makes it timely at a moment when our economy is dominated by giant firms headed by a small handful of men, whose personalities and whims we need to understand whether we like it or not. Amazon in the 2010s was an intensely personal venture, run by one of the wealthiest men in the world according to his own desires and reflecting his own personality. Bezos has recently announced he will be stepping down as C.E.O. before the end of the year, though he will clearly retain some guiding role as the company’s executive chairman.

As biography, the book is both limited and perhaps strengthened by the fact that Stone has lost his former access to Bezos, whom he did get a chance to interview for “The Everything Store.” Stone writes that he later learned the C.E.O. was angry he had tracked down his biological father for that book. (MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’ wife at the time, gave “The Everything Store” a one-star review on Amazon.)

There’s an old journalistic saying that access is a curse, because it puts the author in debt to his source and brings him too close to the person he’s covering. It’s safe to say that “Amazon Unbound” does suffer at times from a lack of psychological insight into Bezos. But it benefits from the author’s distance, and makes for a dense, at times juicy tour of the company Bezos built. Like Alexa, Amazon as a company seems to embody some of Bezos’ best personal qualities (his relentless drive to get you that package on time) and his worst (an “informal cruelty” that defines his company’s culture and requires that his factory workers and executives make personal sacrifices for corporate needs).

At Amazon, nearly every big decision comes down to a meeting with Bezos, at which his deputies hold their breaths, genuinely uncertain of whether he will berate them and tear up their proposals, or double their planned budgets. Some of his fixations, like his determination to create a smart speaker, are visionary. Others are quirky: After reading that a single hamburger can contain meat from a hundred different cows, he decided that Amazon’s fledgling grocery business would distinguish itself by offering a “single-cow burger.” Once his aides got past thinking their boss was joking, they set to work. A few months later, the product manager got another email from Bezos: He was having trouble opening the packaging, and the burger had dripped too much fat onto his grill.

It was, Stone writes, “a different style of innovation,” in which employees “worked backwards from Bezos’ intuition and were catering to his sometimes eclectic tastes (literally).”

On a far larger scale, Stone solves some of the mystery behind Amazon’s HQ2 debacle, in which the company announced plans to build a giant new office complex in Queens, then pulled out in the face of local opposition. That New York City was even a possibility was the result of a decision by Bezos to throw out months of careful study — which had narrowed the choices down to Chicago, Philadelphia and Raleigh — and go instead with his gut.

One of the last-minute additions to the plans, and the ultimate symbol of corporate greed to local foes, were the helipads. Bezos himself once hated helicopters, but all of a sudden they were cropping up everywhere. And it was during this period that he’d grown close to a former actress named Lauren Sanchez, a charismatic pilot who now ran an aviation company.

Bezos is at his most human in the sections where Stone describes how he fell for Sanchez, throwing caution to the wind and courting her so publicly that he was sure to get caught. Stone has the incredible emails between a National Enquirer reporter and her source, who first promised to expose the relationship between a “B-list married actress” and a “Bill Gates type.” The source turned out to be Sanchez’ own brother, a true piece of work who played all angles and insisted to the last that he’d “never sell out anyone.”

So it’s hard not to root for Bezos when, trapped by The Enquirer, he lures the publication into sending him a menacing letter — then cheekily publishes it and exposes the minor scandal himself.

But Bezos isn’t just your average victim of tabloid extortion. He’s the richest man in the world, and has recently fashioned himself as a champion of uppercase “Truth” and “Democracy” by saving The Washington Post. Bezos speculated publicly on the possible political motives behind the revelation of his affair, Stone writes, and tried to shift attention away from the tawdriness and toward the brutal murder of the Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The Post purchase had been a “complexifier” in his public life, Bezos himself once wrote, causing “powerful people” to consider him an “enemy.”

Stone’s reporting makes clear that this was, at best, reasonable paranoia; and at worst, a truly cynical bit of public relations, cashing in on a journalist’s murder to distract from a tabloid scandal. His “noble sentiment,” Stone comments dryly, “had little to do with his yearlong open conduct of an extramarital relationship.” Bezos’ wealth and power will always protect him, but there’s a flip side, too: They can also taint anything he touches.

Ben Smith is the media columnist for The Times.

AMAZON UNBOUND Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire By Brad Stone 478 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

How did fan culture take over? And why is it so scary? Justin Taylor’s novel “Reboot” examines the convergence of entertainment , online arcana and conspiracy theory.

Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker unearth botany’s buried history  to figure out how our gardens grow.

A new photo book reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime with  a stunning visual celebration of black rodeo.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading . Here’s what made Lord Byron so great.

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume  in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

Bus stations. Traffic stops. Beaches. There’s no telling where you’ll find the next story based in Accra, Ghana’s capital . Peace Adzo Medie shares some of her favorites.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Starting a Business
• Growing a Business
• Small Business Guide
• Business News
• Science & Technology
• Money & Finance
• For Subscribers
• Write for Entrepreneur
• Entrepreneur Store
• United States
• Asia Pacific
• Middle East
• South Africa

Copyright © 2024 Entrepreneur Media, LLC All rights reserved. Entrepreneur® and its related marks are registered trademarks of Entrepreneur Media LLC

Inside the Life and Career of Jeff Bezos, the Tech CEO Who Founded Amazon Everything to know about Jeff Bezos, from high school in Miami to flying in space with Blue Origin.

By Sarah Jackson • Aug 25, 2023

Key Takeaways

• Jeff Bezos began his career as a hedge-funder in New York before leaving to start Amazon.
• Amazon struggled to turn a profit at first, but is one of the world's biggest companies today.
• Along the way, Bezos has faced antitrust scrutiny, weathered scandals, traveled to space, and become one of the world's richest people.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider .

Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable names in business.

The 59-year-old tech titan worked at a hedge fund before he left to start Amazon as an online bookseller, ultimately growing it into one of the world's largest companies by revenue. He's also founded space tourism company Blue Origin, which has flown him to the edge of space.

He's a fixture in the world's wealthiest list; currently, Bezos is the third-richest person in the world with a net worth of $158 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index .

With all of his wealth, Bezos has made some splashy purchases. He's the 24th-largest landowner in the US with 420,000 acres, according to the 2022 Land Report , with a real estate portfolio boasting mansions in Hawaii, California, Florida, and more. Bezos also owns the world's biggest sailing yacht , a 417-footer that cost an estimated $500 million.

From his first job flipping burgers at McDonald's to building Amazon into a trillion-dollar company at one point, here's a look at Jeff Bezos' life and career.

Allana Akhtar and Avery Hartmans contributed to an earlier version of this story.

Jeff Bezos' mom, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him on January 12, 1964.

Jeff Bezos with his father, Miguel "Mike" Bezos. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Statue Of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation

She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who later adopted Jeff.

Jeff didn't learn that Miguel, who often goes by Mike, wasn't his real father until he was 10 years old, but he told Wired he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.

In 1968, his mother told his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives.

When author Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his 2013 book, "The Everything Store," Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.

Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age.

When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed, according to an account in the book "The Everything Store."

From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers at his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.

Bezos said he would help vaccinate cattle, fix equipment, and do other chores while at his grandparents. AP Photo/Richard Drew via BI

Decades later, Bezos purchased his own land in Texas . His acreage is used as the launch site for Blue Origin rockets.

Bezos' first job was cooking burgers at a McDonald's in Miami.

Bezos became interested in automation during his time at McDonald's. Joe Raedle/Getty Images via BI

Bezos described the gig at McDonald's as "really hard" in a 2001 interview with Fast Company.

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers. This was my acned-teenager stage. They were like, 'Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'" Bezos said.

Bezos has cited his grandfather, Preston Gise, as an inspiration.

Bezos said his grandfather was an intelligent, quiet man. AP Images via BI

At a commencement address in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him , "it's harder to be kind than clever."

As a child, Bezos fell in love with reruns of the original "Star Trek" and became a fan of later versions too.

Bezos' interest in space goes way back. Paramount Pictures via BI

He even considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, a reference to a line from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, according to the book "The Everything Store." Bezos also considered naming Amazon Cadabra .

In 2016, Bezos even filmed a cameo in a "Star Trek" movie.

At his South Florida high school, Bezos said he wanted to be a "space entrepreneur."

Bezos' space company is called Blue Origin. Getty Images / Blue Origin via BI

In school, Bezos would tell teachers that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Of course, he's made that dream a reality: He now owns space exploration company Blue Origin.

"I do think we have all our eggs in one basket," Bezos said according to a Wired interview in 1999.

To avoid spending a summer flipping burgers at McDonald's, Bezos and his high school girlfriend started a summer camp.

The name of Bezos' summer cap was Dream Institute. Kim Kulish/Getty images via BI

Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids, focused on science, math, and reading.

The camp had six kids who each paid $600 for the session — though two of them were Bezos' siblings. "The Lord of the Rings" series was required reading, and science lessons focused on fossil fuels and space, according to the 1999 Wired article.

Upon graduating high school in 1982, Bezos matriculated at Princeton University, where he majored in computer science.

Princeton University. John Greim / Getty Images via BI

Upon graduation, he turned down job offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a telecommunications startup called Fitel, according to the book "The Everything Store."

After he quit Fitel, he went to Bankers Trust where he worked as a product manager.

Bezos worked at Banker's Trust for about two years. Karl Baron/Flickr via BI

While at Bankers Trust, Bezos focused on selling software to pension-fund clients.

He left Banker's Trust after two years for hedge fund D. E. Shaw.

D.E. Shaw was founded by David Shaw, pictured. D.E. Shaw via BI

He became a senior vice president after only four years, according to a Wired interview.

Meanwhile, Bezos was taking ballroom dancing classes as part of a scheme to increase what he called his "women flow."

Bezos' had an interesting dating strategy. Lisi Niesner/Reuters via BI

The term was a play on Wall Street's "deal flow" and referred to the number of opportunities he had to meet women.

He ended up meeting his future wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at work.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was a D.E. Shaw research associate. The pair married in 1993 and they went on to have four kids together.

By 1994, Bezos's eye was on the internet, after reading about the web's immense growth in one year.

Paul Falardeau via BI

This number astounded him, and he decided he needed to find some way to take advantage of its rapid growth. He made a list of 20 possible products to sell online and decided books were the best option, according to "The Everything Store" book.

He decided to leave D.E. Shaw — a stable and lucrative job — in 1994 to start what would become Amazon.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is silhouetted during a presentation of his company's new Fire smartphone at a news conference in Seattle, Washington June 18, 2014. REUTERS/Jason Redmond via BI

His boss at the firm, David E. Shaw, tried to persuade Bezos to stay, but Bezos was already determined to start his own company. Source: Wired

MacKenzie and Jeff flew to Texas to borrow a car from his father, and then they drove to Seattle, which would become Amazon's headquarters.

Bezos worked on his business plan while the couple were driving across the country, according to Wired. Sara Jaye/Getty Images via BI

Bezos was making revenue projections in the passenger seat the whole way, though the couple did stop to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Bezos started Amazon.com in a garage with a potbelly stove.

Bezos worked out of the garage of a rented house in Bellevue, Washington. Mike Segar/Reuters via BI

He held most of his meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble — which would soon become a competitor.

In the early days, a bell would ring in the office every time someone made a purchase.

AP Photo/Andy Rogers via BI

Amazon's employees would gather to see if anyone knew the customer.

But it took only a few weeks before it was ringing so often that the company put an end to the bell, according to the book "The Everything Store."

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and more than 45 different countries.

Frank Micelotta/Getty Images via BI

In 1997, less than three years after it was founded, Amazon went public on May 15.

When the dot-com crash came, analysts called the company "Amazon.bomb." But it weathered the storm.

The dot-com bust didn't kill Amazon. Mario Tama/Getty Images via BI

The website ended up being one of the startups that wasn't wiped out.

Amazon has now gone beyond selling books to offering almost everything you can imagine.

Amazon has hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world. Shutterstock via BI

The retailer offers, appliances, clothing, groceries, toiletries, and even cloud computing services.

In the early days, Bezos was said to be a demanding boss.

Bezos wasn't always the easiest person to work with. Reuters via BI

Bezos could explode at employees , and rumors circulated that he hired a leadership coach to help him tone it down. He also reportedly gave sarcastic responses when he was upset.

At one point, Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.

Bezos Thomson Reuters via BI

Instead, Bezos required his staff to turn in papers on their proposals. This, he believed, would encourage critical thinking.

Bezos is also known for creating a frugal company culture.

An Amazon office. Business Insider

This contrasts with other big tech firms, which offer free food and perks.

Bezos told Business Insider in 2014 that Amazon did offer great amenities to its employees, but they just weren't the same as other tech companies.

More than 20 years after going public, Amazon now has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.

Amazon has become one of the biggest companies in the world. Alex Wong/Getty Images via BI

Amazon is one of the world's five largest public companies.

His time leading Amazon was not without controversy.

Amazon has come under the spotlight many times. AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais via BI

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon saw a surge in demand as more people were forced to shop online. But the company faced criticism over its treatment of workers , who said the company paid little attention to their health and safety at its fulfillment centers nationwide.

Amazon delivery drivers, who are contractors employed by third-party companies, have also spoken out about the demands of their jobs. Some drivers say Amazon's emphasis on metrics has forced them to use their delivery vans as bathrooms or sacrifice safety to deliver packages on time.

Amazon has faced antitrust concerns , particularly over its treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. Bezos and other tech CEOs were called to testify before Congress in 2020.

He's also gotten rich as an early investor in Google

Google cofounders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin, right. AP via BI

Bezos invested $250,000 in Google . That translated to 3.3 million shares when the company went public in 2004.

Today, that would be worth more than $400 million. Bezos hasn't said whether he kept any of his stock after the initial public offering.

Despite his high net worth, Bezos had the same annual base salary for decades while he was CEO: $81,840.

Security and travel costs for Bezos totaled some $1.6 million in 2016. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via BI

His annual total compensation for many years exceeded $1 million owing to costs related to security and business travel.

In July 2017, Bezos became the world's richest person for the first time.

Bill Gates, left, and Jeff Bezos, right. Getty Images via BI

He momentarily surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a net worth of more than $90 billion.

Today, Bezos is worth $157 billion, and he said he will give most of his wealth to charity.

Bezos has given to a number of causes. REUTERS/Abhishek N. Chinnappa via BI

Some of his more notable contributions include pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund , donating $200 million to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum , and pledging $100 million towards recovery efforts on Maui , where he owns a $78 million home, following the catastrophic wildfires.

But he's also spending his money on other business pursuits.

Amazon was not involved in the deal with The Washington Post. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via BI

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

And he's spent an unknown amount on the private space tourism company Blue Origin.

Bezos made history with his rocket company. Blue Origin via BI

The company made history in 2015 when it successfully launched a reusable rocket.

The rocket, called New Shepard, traveled to an altitude of 62 miles.

Bezos' interest in flying has gotten him into trouble in the past.

Bezos cheated death in 2003. LINDSEY WASSON/Reuters via BI

In 2003, Bezos almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas while scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin.

Over the years, Bezos has also built quite the real estate portfolio.

Jeff Bezos owns all kinds of properties. Stephen Brashear/Getty via BI

He is the country's 24th largest landowner with 420,000 acres.

In January 2017, Bezos was revealed as the anonymous buyer of the Textile Museum in DC's Kalorama neighborhood.

The property dates back to 1912. AgnosticPreachersKid/Wikimedia Commons via BI

The property sold for $23 million, and with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, it is the largest home in Washington, DC.

Bezos also owns five apartments at 212 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Madison Square Park in New York City. Shutterstock via BI

His most recent purchase was in 2021, when he paid a reported $23 million for a four-bedroom unit. He's spent a total of $119 million on apartments in the building.

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner Estate, a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills, California.

The estate has a 13,600-square-foot mansion Los Angeles County/Pictometry via BI

He purchased the property for $165 million , making it California's most expensive real estate transaction at the time. Bezos bought the mansion from David Geffen, who had purchased it in 1990 for $47.5 million.

In 2021, Bezos bought a home in Hawaii located in an isolated area on Maui's south shore near lava fields.

A home in Maui, Hawaii, although not the one Bezos purchased. ejs9/Getty Images via BI

Bezos' Maui home reportedly cost $78 million.

Most recently, Bezos scooped up a $68 million waterfront mansion in Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village.

Indian Creek was ranked the most expensive city in the US in 2021. Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Karwai Tang/WireImage via Getty Images via BI

The sale to Bezos was record-breaking on the island, which has also been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they were divorcing.

The couple decided to split after more than two decades. Dia Dipasupil / Staff via BI

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Jeff and MacKenzie announced on Twitter they had finalized the term of their divorce in April 2019.

MacKenzie was with Jeff before he ever started Amazon. Reuters via BI

MacKenzie, who changed her last name to Scott, retained more than $35 billion in Amazon stock , making her one of the world's richest women.

Scott, whose net worth is $36 billion, has donated at least $14.5 billion since 2019 , when she vowed to give away most of her fortune in her lifetime.

Shortly after they announced their divorce, news broke that Bezos was dating TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

Sanchez and Bezos originally met when both of them were still married. When they started dating is unclear. Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Getty Images via BI

At the time, the National Enquirer said it had obtained texts and explicit photos the couple had sent to each other. The publication also said at the time that it had "raunchy messages" between Bezos and Sanchez .

Bezos immediately launched an investigation into who had leaked his personal messages.

Bezos' head of security helmed the investigation. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via BI

Soon after, he dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post accusing National Enquirer publisher AMI of trying to blackmail him .

"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote.

Since then, Bezos and Sanchez have had a whirlwind few years.

Sanchez and Bezos travel the world together. Reuters/Andrew Couldridge via BI

The couple are often captured traveling around the world together . They've been spotted attending Wimbledon together, yachting with other moguls and celebrities, and vacationing in Saint-Tropez and St. Barths.

Throughout the summer, they've frequently been spotted on Bezos' new yacht.

Bezos and Sanchez hanging out in Portofino. MEGA / Contributor / Getty Images via BI

The ship, which cost an estimated $500 million to build , is 417 feet long and said to be the largest in the world. Bezos may have even put a sculpture of Sanchez on the bow of the ship .

In May, multiple outlets reported that the pair had gotten engaged.

Jeff Bezos and Laura Sanchez in 2022. Jordan Strauss/AP via BI

They marked the engagement with a party in August attended by guests like Bill Gates and Kris Jenner.

In 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon's CEO and transition to executive chairman after 27 years at the company's helm.

Jeff Bezos was succeeded by Amazon executive Andy Jassy. Kevin Winter/Getty Images via BI

Bezos said that he planned to spend more time on philanthropy — including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund — as well as his two other major endeavors: The Washington Post and his rocket company, Blue Origin.

That month, he took an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft.

The rocket had flown 15 times before, but this was it's first time with people onboard. Isaiah J. Downing/Reuters via BI

The trip marked his company's first human spaceflight .

He was accompanied by his brother, Mark; a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen ; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the '60s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.

Though Bezos remains the third-richest person in the world today, his wealth took a tumble last year.

Jeff Bezos. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File via BI

In Forbes' annual ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, Bezos came out as the biggest loser: His net worth fell $57 billion from March 2022 to March 2023 but still sat at a cool $114 billion at the time.

Amazon's stock fell 50% in 2022, and it became the first public company to ever lose $1 trillion in market value . Don't feel too bad for him — with Amazon's stock bouncing back this year, Bezos' wallet has largely recovered.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick Red Arrow

• James Clear Explains Why the 'Two Minute Rule' Is the Key to Long-Term Habit Building
• They Designed One Simple Product With a 'Focus on Human Health' — and Made $40 Million Last Year
• Lock Younger Americans Don't Necessarily Want to Retire in Florida — and the 2 Affordable States at the Top of Their List Might Surprise You
• I Tried Airchat , the Hottest New Social Media App in Silicon Valley — Here's How It Works
• Lock This Side Hustle Is Helping Farmers Earn Up to $60,000 a Year While Connecting Outdoor Lovers With Untouched Wilderness
• Are Franchises in the Clear After the Expanded Joint Employer Rule Was Struck Down? Industry Experts Answer 2 Critical Questions About What's Next.

Most Popular Red Arrow

Franchising is not for everyone. explore these lucrative alternatives to expand your business..

Not every business can be franchised, nor should it. While franchising can be the right growth vehicle for someone with an established brand and proven concept that's ripe for growth, there are other options available for business owners.

Passengers Are Now Entitled to a Full Cash Refund for Canceled Flights, 'Significant' Delays

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced new rules for commercial passengers on Wednesday.

Elon Musk Tells Investors Cheaper Tesla Electric Cars Should Arrive Ahead of Schedule

On an earnings call, Musk told shareholders that Tesla could start producing new, affordable electric cars earlier than expected.

63 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2024

We put together a list of the best, most profitable small business ideas for entrepreneurs to pursue in 2024.

Why Companies Should Prioritize Emotional Intelligence Training Alongside AI Implementation

Emotional intelligence is just as important as artificial intelligence, and we need it now more than ever.

The TikTok Ban Bill Has Been Signed — Here's How Long ByteDance Has to Sell, and Why TikTok Is Preparing for a Legal Battle

TikTok has nine months to cut ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance.

Successfully copied link

Jeff Bezos: The Biography (A Complete Life from Beginning to the End‪)‬

Publisher description.

History Hub presents a short and captivating look into Jeff Bezos’ complete life from beginning to end, one of history’s great notable figures worthy to discover. Everyone with an internet connection knows the website Amazon.com and its owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s also known for being the world’s wealthiest man, surpassing the tech mogul Bill Gates. However, most didn’t know how he was born into teenage parents surrounded by poverty; how he worked part-time while Bezos was a student; and how he opened his first business in high school. Bezos’ life tells the story of a man who relentlessly achieved his dreams despite the challenges and difficulties along the way. Discover in this short biography the remarkable story of a life who inspired generations to come. This book also contains 30 questions for an in-depth discussion into the life of Jeff Bezos. Download your copy now on sale Read on your PC, Mac, iOS or Android smartphone, tablet devices.

More Books Like This

More books by history hub.

• Biographies & Memoirs
• Community & Culture

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Jeff Bezos: The Biography (A Complete Life from Beginning to the End) Paperback – June 7, 2021

• Print length 46 pages
• Language English
• Publication date June 7, 2021
• Dimensions 6 x 0.12 x 9 inches
• ISBN-13 979-8516781315
• See all details

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B096TRWR3G
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (June 7, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 46 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8516781315
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.89 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.12 x 9 inches
• #45,726 in Women's Biographies
• #77,957 in Historical Biographies (Books)

About the author

History hub.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

No customer reviews

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Jeff Bezos’s Ambitious Orbital Reef Space Station Clears Essential Milestones: A ScienceAlert Update

T he future of the International Space Station (ISS) is limited, and NASA has begun investment into its successors. Orbital Reef, a space station project co-developed by Jeff Bezos ‘s Blue Origin and Sierra Space, appears to be a leading contender, having made significant progress recently.

It has been reported by NASA on Wednesday that Orbital Reef passed critical technology development milestones, which included a recycling system designed to convert astronauts’ urine into drinkable water.

Angela Hart, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program, emphasized the importance of these milestones, as they are crucial for ensuring that a commercial space station can sustain human life.

Throughout the testing process, the Orbital Reef’s regenerative system demonstrated capabilities in air purification, urine recovery, and water tank management.

NASA’s ISS follows a similar method for recycling water and oxygen generated from human activities, including converting urine into potable water, a process benefiting the agency by reducing launch costs and saving money.

Emergence of Blue Origin’s Space Station

NASA’s funding of Blue Origin and Sierra Space to the tune of US$172 million is in line with their objective to see the development of commercially operated American space stations in low-Earth orbit to succeed the ISS.

With these new stations, NASA envisions continued astronaut deployments and commercial opportunities, including space tourism.

NASA is transitioning the responsibility of maintaining low-Earth orbits to commercial entities to reallocate funds towards more ambitious projects like the Artemis missions aimed at establishing a human presence on the moon, lunar orbit, and possibly, a Mars mission in the future.

The Decline of the ISS

The aging ISS is contending with issues such as cracks in Russian modules and air leaks. The commitment by the Biden administration to maintain the ISS until 2030 will hopefully allow time for the transition to Orbital Reef or equivalent commercial space stations.

Although ticket prices for a trip to Orbital Reef are not yet disclosed, for budgetary reference, short suborbital trips with Blue Origin’s New Shepard are currently in the multimillions.

This article draws upon information originally published by Business Insider .

Orbital Reef is a proposed commercial space station developed as a collaboration between Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Sierra Space.

Orbital Reef has successfully passed tests on its regenerative system, which included air purification and urine recycling into drinkable water.

NASA is funding commercial space stations to shift the burden of low-Earth orbit operations onto private companies, enabling NASA to focus on deeper space exploration ventures, such as missions to the moon and Mars.

NASA awarded Blue Origin and Sierra Space a combined sum of US$172 million for the development of the space station.

The ISS recycles water through a system that purifies water from various human activities, including urine, which is turned into drinkable water. This reduces launch costs for the agency.

The ISS is set to be operational until at least 2030, after which it will potentially be replaced by commercial space stations like Orbital Reef.

The progress of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Sierra Space’s Orbital Reef represents a significant stride in the development of the next generation of space stations. As NASA shifts its focus towards ambitious projects such as Artemis, Orbital Reef’s completion of key technological milestones showcases the potential for commercial entities to take up the mantle of low-Earth orbit operations. With the ISS approaching the end of its lifespan, the era of commercial space stations that cater to both professional astronauts and space tourists is drawing nearer, signaling a new age in space exploration and travel.