Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/ BAY-zohss;[1] né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and computer engineer. He is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, where he previously served as the chairman, president, and CEO. With a net worth of about $190 billion as of August 2021, he is the 2nd richest person in the world after Bernard Arnault according to both Forbes and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.[2]
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Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world's largest provider of virtual assistants[3] and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth. The company has upcoming plans to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight.[4] 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.
The first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index,[5] Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018.[6] In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion.[7] In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos's wealth grew by approximately $24 billion.[8] On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as the CEO of Amazon and transitioned into the role of executive chairman; Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon's cloud computing division,[9][10] replaced Bezos as the CEO of Amazon. On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos flew to space alongside his brother Mark Bezos.[11] The suborbital flight lasted over 10 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of 66.5 miles (107.0 km).[12]
Early life
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964,[13] the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Theodore Jorgensen.[14] His biological great-grandfather, John Jørgensen, was born on the small island of Samsø (which is today part of Denmark). John immigrated to Chicago sometime around 1900 and had a son, Theodore "Ted" John Jorgensen (born 1917) with his wife, Ida Minnie Jorgensen, who was also born in Denmark. This son was the father of Ted Jorgensen (born 1944), Bezos' biological father.[15][better source needed][16] At the time of Bezos' birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19 years old.[17] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing Bezos along as a baby.[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 Bezos, whose surname was then legally changed from "Jorgensen" to "Bezos".[20]
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.[21] Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.[22] Bezos' maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.[23] Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers in his youth.[24] Bezos would later purchase this ranch and expand it from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 300,000 acres (121,406 ha).[25][26] His maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (née Strait), through whom he is a cousin of country singer George Strait.[27] Bezos 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 Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School.[30][31] While Bezos 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] In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science; he was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[36][37] While at Princeton, Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton's 11 eating clubs.[38] In addition, he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).[39][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. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.[43][41]
Amazon
In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore.[44] He left his job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle.[45][46] Prior to settling on Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.[47] 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.[48] At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with "A" would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches.[49] 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.[49] He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.[46][50][51] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.[52] Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.[43][48] Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering (IPO).[53] 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.[48]
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.[48] Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's 1997 equity offering to finance aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors.[48] In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.[54] In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.[48] In late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when revenues stagnated.[55] After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce.[54] In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million.[56][failed verification] In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle.[57] 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.[58] In 2013, Bezos secured a $600-million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services.[59] In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.[60]
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.[61] On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million.[62] A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers.[63] 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.[64] On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.[65] On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion.[66] Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often expressed interest in expanding Amazon into India.[67] 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.[68]
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In March 2018, Bezos dispatched Amit Agarwal, Amazon's global senior vice president, to India with $5.5 billion to localize operations throughout the company's supply chain routes.[70] Later in the month, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Amazon and Bezos, specifically of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices.[71] Amazon's share price fell by 9% in response to the President's negative comments; this reduced Bezos's personal wealth by $10.7 billion.[72] Weeks later, Bezos recouped his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University indicated that Trump could do little to regulate Amazon in any meaningful way.[73] During July 2018, a number of members of the U.S. Congress called on Bezos to detail the applications of Amazon's face recognition software, Rekognition.[74]
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Criticism of Amazon's business practices continued in September 2018 when Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act and accused Amazon of receiving corporate welfare.[76] This followed revelations by the non-profit group New Food Economy which found that one third of Amazon workers in Arizona, and one tenth of Amazon workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, relied on food stamps.[77] While preparing to introduce the bill, Sanders opined: "Instead of attempting to explore Mars or go to the moon, how about Jeff Bezos pays his workers a living wage?"[78] He later said: "Bezos could play a profound role. If he said today, nobody who is employed at Amazon will receive less than a living wage, it would send a message to every corporation in America."[79] Sanders's efforts elicited a response from Amazon which pointed to the 130,000 jobs it created in 2017 and called the $28,446 figure for its median salary "misleading" as it included part-time workers.[80] However, Sanders countered that the companies targeted by his proposal have placed an increased focus on part-time workers to escape benefit obligations.[81] On October 2, 2018, Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase, which Sanders applauded.[82] The American workers who were being paid the minimum wage had this increased to $15 per hour, a decision that was interpreted as support for the Fight for $15 movement.[83]
In February 2021, Bezos announced that in the third quarter of 2021 he would step down from his role as CEO of Amazon, to become the Executive Chair of the Amazon Board. He will be replaced as CEO by Andy Jassy.[84] On February 2, 2021, Bezos sent an email[85] to all Amazon employees, telling them the transition would give him "the time and energy [he] need[s] to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and [his] other passions."[86]
Blue Origin
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In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup.[87] Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel and the development of human life in the Solar System.[34] He was the valedictorian when he graduated from high school in 1982. His speech was followed up with a Miami Herald interview in which he expressed an interest to build and develop hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for human beings who were in orbit.[88] The 18-year-old Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion.[89] Rob Meyerson led Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017 and served as its first president.[90]
After its founding, Blue Origin maintained a low profile until 2006 when it purchased a large tract of land in West Texas for a launch and test facility.[91] After the company gained the public's attention during the late 2000s, Bezos additionally indicated his interest in reducing the cost of space travel for humans while also increasing the safety of extraterrestrial travel.[92] In September 2011, one of the company's unmanned prototype vehicles crashed during a short-hop test flight. Although the crash was viewed as a setback, news outlets noted how far the company went from its founding-to-date in advancing spaceflight.[93] After the crash, Bezos has been superstitiously wearing his "lucky" Texas Cowboy boots to all rocket launches.[94] In May 2013, Bezos met with Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Galactic, to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies.[95] He has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk as all three are billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.[96]
In 2015, Bezos announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development and would make its first flight in the late-2010s.[97] Later in November, Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle successfully rocketed into space and reached its planned test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before executing a vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas. In 2016, Bezos allowed select journalists to visit, tour, and photograph his facility.[98] He has repeatedly called for increased inter-space energy and industrial manufacturing to decrease the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.[99]
In December 2017, New Shepard successfully flew and landed dummy passengers, amending and pushing its human space travel start date into late 2018.[100] To execute this program, Blue Origin built six of the vehicles to support all phases of testing and operations: no-passenger test flights, flights with test passengers, and commercial-passenger weekly operations.[101] Since 2016, Bezos has spoken more freely about his hopes to colonize the solar system, and has been selling US$1 billion in Amazon stock each year to capitalize Blue Origin in an effort to support this endeavor.[102][103] In May 2018, Bezos maintained that the primary goal of Blue Origin is to preserve the natural resources of Earth by making the human species multi-planetary.[104] He announced that New Shepard would begin transporting humans into sub-orbital space by November 2018.[104] In July 2018, it was announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person.[105]
On July 20, 2021, he launched on the NS-16 mission with his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. He launched nine days after Richard Branson launched onboard The Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission.
The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash,[106] at the suggestion of his friend, Don Graham.[107] To execute the sale, he established limited liability company Nash Holdings to serve as a holding company through which he would own the newspaper.[108] The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings took control.[109] In March 2014, Bezos made his first significant change at The Washington Post and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of a number of U.S. local newspapers in Texas, Hawaii, and Minnesota.[110] In January 2016, Bezos set out to reinvent the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software.[111] Throughout the early years of ownership, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the paper.[112] Bezos and the newspaper's editorial board have dismissed accusations that he unfairly controlled the paper's content and Bezos maintains the paper's independence.[113][114] After a surge in online readership in 2016, the paper was profitable for the first time since Bezos made the purchase in 2013.[114]
Bezos Expeditions
Bezos makes personal investments through his venture capital vehicle, Bezos Expeditions.[115] He was one of the first shareholders in Google, when he invested $250,000 in 1998. That $250,000 investment resulted in 3.3 million shares of Google stock, worth about $3.1 billion in 2017.[116][117] He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life-extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging.[118] Bezos is involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, GRAIL, Juno Therapeutics, and Zocdoc.[119] In January 2018, an announcement was made concerning Bezos's role within a new, unnamed healthcare company. This venture, later named Haven, is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway.[120][121]
Bezos also supports philanthropic efforts through direct donations and non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions.[122] Bezos used Bezos Expeditions to fund several philanthropic projects, including an Innovation center at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry and the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute.[123][124] In 2013, Bezos Expeditions funded the recovery of two Saturn V first-stage Rocketdyne F-1 engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.[125] They were positively identified as belonging to the Apollo 11 mission's S-1C stage from July 1969.[126][127] The engines are currently on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.[128][129]
Day 1 Fund
Through his Day 1 Families' Fund, Bezos issues annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing "compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families". Its vision statement comes from the inspiring Mary's Place in Seattle: "no child sleeps outside
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