Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/ *BAY-zohss*;[2] né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor and investor. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. With a net worth of about US$170 billion as of November 2023, Bezos is the third-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.[3][4]
Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in mid 1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle.
The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015 and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth; he flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021. He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded the biotechnology company Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.[5]
The first centibillionaire on the *Forbes* Real Time Billionaires Index and the second ever to have eclipsed the feat since Bill Gates in 1999,[6] Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018.[7] In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion.[8]
In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, his wealth grew by approximately $24 billion.[9] On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon and took over the role of executive chairman. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as the CEO and president of Amazon. In September 2022, he was ranked second on the *Forbes* 400 list of wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of $151 billion.
Early life and education
Bezos was born "Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen" on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico,[10] as the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen.[11] At the time of Jeff's birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19-years-old.[12] Jorgensen was a Danish American unicyclist[13] born in Chicago to a family of Baptists.[14] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school, bringing her baby with her.[15] Jeff attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was 2-years-old.[16]
Ted Jorgensen drank and struggled financially.[17] Jacklyn left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was 17-months-old.[18] After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968.[19] Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jeff, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.[20] Gise, her husband and her son left the area and asked Jorgensen to discontinue contact, to which he agreed.[21]
After Mike had received his degree from the University of New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon.[22] Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.[23] Jeff's maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.[24]
Lawrence retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Jeff would spend many summers in his youth.[25] Jeff would later purchase this ranch and expand it from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 300,000 acres (121,406 ha).[26][27] Jeff displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.[28][29] The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School.[30][31] While Jeff was in high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.[32]
Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar,[33][34] and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.[33] In his graduation speech, Bezos told the audience he dreamed of the day when mankind would colonize space. A local newspaper quoted his intention "to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park".[35]
After graduating from high school in 1982, Bezos attended Princeton University. He initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science.[36] Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton's 11 eating clubs.[37] In addition, he was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).[38][39] He had a 4.2 GPA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), summa cum laude.[40]
Business career
Early career
After Bezos graduated from college in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others.[41] He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.[42] Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling from 1990 until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president by age 30.[43][41]
Amazon
Main article: Amazon
Bezos (front row, center) at the Robot Co-op in 2005.
In spring 1994, Bezos read that web usage was growing at a rate of 2300% a year and eventually decided to establish an online bookstore.[44] He and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, left their jobs at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle.[45][46]
With Bezos at the helm and Scott taking an integral role in its operation—writing checks, keeping track of the books, and negotiating the company's first freight contracts—the foundation was laid for this garage-run operation to grow exponentially.[47] Prior to settling in Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.[48]
Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet.[49] At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with "A" would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches.[50] In addition, he regarded "Amazon," the name of the world's largest river as fitting for what he hoped would become the world's largest online bookstore.[50] He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents as an investment in Amazon.[46][51][52] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.[53]
Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.[43][49] Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering (IPO).[54] In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the Internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.[49]
In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company's products to include a variety of other consumer goods.[49] Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's 1997 equity offering to finance the aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors.[49] In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.[55]
In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.[49] In late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when revenues stagnated.[56] After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce.[55] In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million.[57][failed verification]
In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle.[58] According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos wished to create a device that allowed a "flow state" in reading similar to the experience of video games.[59] In 2013, Bezos secured a $600-million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services.[60] In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.[61]
Bezos in 2010.
In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than one million shares of his holdings in the company for $671 million, the largest sum he had ever raised from selling some of his Amazon stock.[62] On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million.[63] A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers.[64]
By January 19, 2018, his Amazon stock holdings had appreciated to slightly over $109 billion; months later he began to sell stock to raise cash for other enterprises, in particular, Blue Origin.[65] On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.[66] On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion.[67] Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often expressed interest in expanding Amazon into India.[68] On July 27, 2017, Bezos momentarily became the world's wealthiest person over Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates when his estimated net worth increased to just over $90 billion. His wealth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, and he was formally designated the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes on March 6, 2018, with a net worth of $112 billion.[69]
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Altos Labs would primarily focus on a technology called reprogramming, which works by adding proteins to a cell which essentially instruct it to revert to a stem-cell-like state. Scientist Shinya Yamanaka won a joint Nobel Prize in 2012 for demonstrating the technique in mice. Yamanaka will be joining Alto Labs as chair of its scientific advisory board.