About
Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/;[a][4] born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen; January 12, 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and president of Amazon.| Jeff Bezos |
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Streetin a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He 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 expanded to a variety of products and services, including video and audio streaming. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services via its Amazon Web Services arm.
Bezos added to his business interests when he founded aerospace company Blue Origin in 2000. A Blue Origin test flight successfully first reached space in 2015, and Blue has plans to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight in 2019. He purchased The Washington Post in 2013 for US$250 millionin cash. Bezos manages other business investments through his venture capital fund, Bezos Expeditions.
On July 27, 2017, he became the world's wealthiest person when his estimated net worth increased to just over $90 billion. Bezos's 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. The first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, he was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018.[5]
Early Life
Early Life
Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the son of Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Chicago, Illinois, native Ted Jorgensen.[6]At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student, and his father was a bike shop owner.[7] After Jacklyn divorced Ted, she married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968.[8] Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose surname was then changed to Bezos.[9] The family moved to Houston, Texas, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he received a degree from the University of New Mexico.[10] Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.[11]
Bezos is the maternal grandson of Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.[12] Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers in his youth.[10] Bezos would later purchase this ranch and grow it from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 300,000 acres (121,406 ha).[13][14] His maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (née Strait), through whom he is a cousin of country singer George Strait.[15] Bezos often displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency; he once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.[16][17]
The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School.[18][19] While Bezos was in high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.[20] He attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar,[21][22] and a Silver Knight Awardwinner in 1982.[21] In 1986, he graduated from Princeton University with a 4.2 grade point average and Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer scienceand was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[23][24]While at Princeton, he was also elected to Tau Beta Pi and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.[25][
Business Career
Early career
After Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others.[27]He first worked at Fitel, a fintechtelecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.[28] Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter.[29] He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust; he worked there from 1988 to 1990.[29] He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund, in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at the age of 30.[29][27]
Amazon
Bezos (center) at a cooperative for robotics in 2005
In late 1993, Bezos decided to start an online bookstore.[30] 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 trip from New York to Seattle.[31][32] 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.[33]He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.[32] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.[34] Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.[29][33]Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering(IPO).[35] 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.[33]
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Bezos receives the James Smithson Bicentennial medal in 2016 for his work with Amazon.
In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video; by the end of the year, he had also expanded the company's products to include a variety of consumer goods.[33]Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's 1997 equity offering to finance aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors.[33] In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.[33] In late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when revenues stagnated.[36] In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.[37] After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce.[37] In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million.[38] In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle.[39] According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos wished to create the same flow statefound in video game simulations in books; he wished readers would fully engage with books.[40] In 2013, Bezos secured a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services.[41] In October that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.[42]
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.[43] On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million.[44] A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers.[45] 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.[46] On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.[47] On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion.[48] Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often expressed interest in expanding Amazon into India.[49]
Bezos in 2017
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.[50] Later in the month, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Amazon–and Bezos, specifically–of sales taxavoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices.[51] 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.[52]Weeks later, Bezos recouped his losses when academic reports out of Stanford Universityindicated that Trump could do little to regulate Amazon in any meaningful way.[53] During July 2018, a number of members of the U.S. Congress called on Bezos to detail the applications of Amazon's face recognitionsoftware, Rekognition.[54] Additionally, statements by the Trump administration, in favor of overturning the antitrust law known as the Paramount Decree, have been predicted to help Amazon acquire the Landmark Theaters chain.[55]
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.[56] 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.[57] 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?"[58] 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."[59] 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.[60] However, Sanders countered that the companies targeted by his proposal have placed an increased focus on part-time workers to escape benefit obligations.[61] On October 2, 2018, Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase, which Sanders applauded.[62] 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.[63]
Blue Origin
Bezos giving NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver (fourth from left) a tour of Blue Origin's crew capsule in 2011.
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Cartermeets with Bezos in 2016 at The Pentagon.
In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company.[64] Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel and the development of human life in the solar system.[22] 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.[65] The 18-year-old Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion.[66]
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.[67] 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.[68] 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.[69] In May 2013, Bezos met with Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Galactic, to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies.[70] He has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk as all three are billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.[71]
In 2015, Bezos announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development and would make its first flight in the late-2010s.[72]Later in November, Blue Origin's New Shepardspace 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.[73] He has repeatedly called for increased inter-space energy and industrial manufacturing to decrease the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.[74]
In December 2017, New Shepard successfully flew and landed dummy passengers, amending and pushing its human space travel start date into late 2018.[75] 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.[76] Since 2016, Bezos has spoken more freely about his hopes to colonize the solar system, and has been selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to capitalize Blue Origin in an effort to support this endeavor.[77][78] 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.[79] He announced that New Shepard would begin transporting humans into sub-orbital space by November 2018.[79] In July 2018, it was announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person.[80]
The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash.[81] To execute the sale, he established Nash Holdings, a limited liability holding company that legally owns the paper.[82] The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings took control.[83] 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.[84] 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.[85] Throughout the early years of ownership, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the paper.[86]Bezos and the newspaper's editorial boardhave dismissed accusations that he unfairly controlled the paper's content and Bezos maintains the paper's independence.[87][88]After a surge in online readership in 2016, the paper was profitable for the first time since Bezos made the purchase in 2013.[88]
Bezos Expeditions
Bezos makes personal investments through his venture capital vehicle, Bezos Expeditions.[89] 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.[90][91] He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life-extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging.[92] Bezos is involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, Grail, Juno Therapeutics, and ZocDoc.[93] 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.[94][95]
Public image
Journalist Nellie Bowles of The New York Times has described the public persona and personality of Bezos as that of "a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan".[96] During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charityand social welfare.[96][97] His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon. Bezos was a multi-billionaire who hung his clothes on a rack in his Amazon headquarters office and drove a 1996 Honda Accord.[98] Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy, often wearing ill-fitting clothing and making a variety of social missteps.[99][100][101]
Bezos was seen by the public as needlessly quantitative and data-driven.[102][103] This perception was detailed by Alan Deutschman who described him as "talking in lists" and "[enumerating] the criteria, in order of importance, for every decision he has made."[99] Select accounts of his persona have drawn controversy and public attention. Notably, journalist Brad Stone wrote an unauthorized book that described Bezos as a demanding boss as well as hyper-competitive.[97][102] Bezos has been stereotyped as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.[104][105] This depiction has been challenged by Bezos himself, his wife, Amazon employees, and the public as a mischaracterization.[106]
During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for aggressive business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money.[107] His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company.[108][109] His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parodied as an enterprising super villain.[110][111][112] Since 2017, he has been portrayed by Kyle Mooney and Steve Carrellon Saturday Night Live, usually as an undercutting, domineering figure.[113] Bezos eats exotic foods, such as octopus and roasted iguana.[114][115][116] In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederationnamed Bezos the "World's Worst Boss", with its general secretary Sharan Burrow saying: "Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model."[117] During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business-related expenses.[13] His relative lack of philanthropy compared to other billionaires has drawn a negative response from the public since 2016.[118][13] Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a New York Times piece.[119][
Leadership style
Journalist Nellie Bowles of The New York Times has described the public persona and personality of Bezos as that of "a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan".[96] During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charityand social welfare.[96][97] His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon. Bezos was a multi-billionaire who hung his clothes on a rack in his Amazon headquarters office and drove a 1996 Honda Accord.[98] Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy, often wearing ill-fitting clothing and making a variety of social missteps.[99][100][101]
Bezos was seen by the public as needlessly quantitative and data-driven.[102][103] This perception was detailed by Alan Deutschman who described him as "talking in lists" and "[enumerating] the criteria, in order of importance, for every decision he has made."[99] Select accounts of his persona have drawn controversy and public attention. Notably, journalist Brad Stone wrote an unauthorized book that described Bezos as a demanding boss as well as hyper-competitive.[97][102] Bezos has been stereotyped as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.[104][105] This depiction has been challenged by Bezos himself, his wife, Amazon employees, and the public as a mischaracterization.[106]
During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for aggressive business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money.[107] His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company.[108][109] His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parodied as an enterprising super villain.[110][111][112] Since 2017, he has been portrayed by Kyle Mooney and Steve Carrellon Saturday Night Live, usually as an undercutting, domineering figure.[113] Bezos eats exotic foods, such as octopus and roasted iguana.[114][115][116] In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederationnamed Bezos the "World's Worst Boss", with its general secretary Sharan Burrow saying: "Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model."[117] During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business-related expenses.[13] His relative lack of philanthropy compared to other billionaires has drawn a negative response from the public since 2016.[118][13] Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a New York Times piece.[119][
Personal life
In 1992, Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan, New York City, when he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later.[29][189] In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon.[190] He and his wife are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.[66][191]
In March 2003, Bezos was one of three passengers in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas after the craft's tail boom hit a tree.[192] Bezos sustained minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.[24]
In 2016, Bezos played a Starfleet official in the movie Star Trek Beyond, and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Conscreening.[193]
On January 9, 2019, Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, announced on Twitter their intent to divorce after a "long period" of separation.[194][195][196] On April 4, 2019, the divorce was finalized, with Bezos keeping 75% of the couple's Amazon stock and MacKenzie getting the remaining 25% ($35.6 billion) in Amazon stock. However, Bezos would keep all of the couple's voting rights.[197]
On February 7, 2019, Bezos published an online essay in which he accused American Media, Inc. owner David Pecker of "extortion and blackmail" for threatening to publish intimate photos of Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, if he did not stop his investigation into how his text messages and other photos had been leaked to the National Enquirer.[198][199]
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