Jeff Bezos Biography

Business Leader, Entrepreneur (1964–)

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American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is the founder and chief
executive officer of Amazon.com and owner of 'The Washington
Post.' His successful business ventures have made him one of the
richest people in the world.
Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in
Albuquerque, 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, he quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, a virtual
bookstore that became one of the internet's biggest success stories. In 2013, Bezos
purchased TheWashington Post in a $250 million deal. His successful business ventures have
made him one of the richest people in the world.

Early Life and Career

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, and when Bezos was 4 years old his mother re-married, to Cuban
immigrant Mike Bezos.

As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents'
garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house. 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.

Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated summa
cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. After
graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and
the investment firm D.E. Shaw. It was there he met his wife, Mackenzie, and became the
company's youngest vice president in 1990.
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.

Launching Amazon.com

Bezos set up the office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few
employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a two-bedroom
house, equipped with three Sun Microstations, and eventually developed a test site. After
inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the
meandering South American River, on July 16, 1995.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.comsold
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 start-up team had
envisioned.

Amazon.com 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.

In 2006, Amazon.com launched its video on demand service; initially known as Amazon
Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video. In 2007, the company
released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read
and store their book selections. That same year, Bezos announced his investment in Blue
Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company that develops technologies to offer space travel to
paying customers.

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 Prime & Amazon Studios

In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental
initiative by Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones—remote-controlled
machines that can perform an array of human tasks—to provide delivery services to
customers. According to Bezos, these drones are able to carry items weighing up to five
pounds, and are capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution
center. He also stated that Prime Air could become a reality within as little as four or five
years.

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. However, Bezos did score a victory with the development of original content through
Amazon Studios. After premiering several new programs in 2013, Amazon hit it big in 2014
with the critically acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle. In 2015, the company
produced and released Spike Lee's Chi-Raq as its first original feature film.

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 July 2017, Bezos briefly surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the richest
person in the world, according to Bloomberg, before dropping back to No. 2. The Amazon
chief then reclaimed the top spot in October, and in January 2018, Bloomberg pegged his net
worth at $105.1 billion, making him the richest person in history. Two months later, Bezos
was up to $127 billion, equal to the combined wealth of 2.3 million average Americans,
before continuing his surge to the $150 billion plateau in mid-July.

Healthcare Venture

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," said Bezos. "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."

Not long afterward, The Seattle Times reported that more changes were afoot for Amazon,
with the company consolidating its consumer retail operations in order to focus on Alexa,
AWS, digital entertainment and other growing areas. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed
the news, saying, "As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count
adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive
hiring in many others."
In April 2018, as part of his annual shareholder letter, Bezos said the company had surpassed
100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. He added that 2017 had been an outstanding
year for hardware sales, and that Amazon would continue to invest in expanding its customer
base, brand and infrastructure.

Who is the richest man in the world?

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos surpassed Bill Gates in July 2017 to become
not only the world’s richest man, but the richest person in the world with
an estimated net worth of $112 billion, according to Forbes’s 2018
Billionaires List.

Bezos’s fortune jumped in 2017 amid a remarkable year for the retail
giant, in which the company bought Whole Foods in June 2017 and had a
record-breaking Amazon Prime Day.

Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, owns
about 17% of Amazon.com, which is part of what buoyed him to the
world’s richest man. Morgan Stanley analysts predicted the company
would soon be worth $1 trillion, and Bezos himself earned $20 million in
the last year

Blue Origin

Pioneering e-commerce, reinventing book trade, and becoming one of the

most prominent figures of the internet was only a portion of Bezos’s
goals. His long term plans have always been grand, and seemingly out of
reach – and the success of Amazon served as a gateway for Jeff to finally
realize his wild ambitions. Bezos’s mother keeps a copy of a speech he
made while back in school where he declares his goal of establishing a
fleet of habitable orbiting space stations, turning Earth into one big nature
reserve. This ambition of his was not left abandoned.
In 2004, Bezos founded an aerospace company named Blue Origin, aimed
at developing new technology for spaceflight, with the ultimate goal of
establishing “an enduring human presence in outer space.” The company
owns a 26-acre research campus just outside Seattle, and a private
rocket launching facility in West Texas. On November 24, 2015, Blue
Origin made headlines when they successfully managed to send a rocket
to suborbital space and land it safely onto a landing pad after takeoff
while they were testing their New Shepard space vehicle. new Shepard is
a multi-passenger rocket-propelled vehicle designed to establish travel to
suborbital space at competitive prices. The rocket landing has been
deemed ‘historic’ as no other space company has managed to pull off
such a feat. The success of this mission means a significant decrease in
the cost of spaceflight and a step closer to establishing an opportunity for
the general public to engage in space travel.
It is worth mentioning that both companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, did
an excellent job. However, orbital and suborbital flights are different
types of spaceflights that cannot be compared, which is better or worse.
Soon, one of the Reddit’s users zlsa drew a visual illustration on SpaceX
Falcon 9 vs Blue Origin New Shepard rockets’ trajectory that helped to
clear the difference between those types of spaceflights.

SpaceX Falcon 9 vs Blue Origin New Shepard

The Washington Post

On August 05, 2013, Bezos was on the news for having entirely
purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. “The Post could
have survived under the company’s ownership,” company’s chairman and
chief executive Donald E. Graham says, “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.” Bezos reaffirmed that he did not seek to alter
the values of The Washington Post, but merely to fix its focus on the
public. “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.” The Graham family – descendants of Eugene Meyer, who acquired
The Post in 1933 – had owned it for four generations. Bezos announced
that he was meaning to maintain the existing management, expressing
respect and admiration for the Graham family.

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family for $250 million in cash.
Personality Traits & Leadership Qualities

Bezos is known for his double-personality that turns him from a kind
person into a rough executive inducing fear and respect in his employees.
A hyper-intelligent, ultra-driven individual, he expects everyone around
him to behave likewise. Amazon staff are said to be living in fear of
his abrasive flare-ups, including “Why are you wasting my life?” and “Are
you lazy or just incompetent?”
Jeff Bezos seems to have no problem running the company while still
personally reading feedback from customers. “We research each of them
because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is
done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of
information,” senior Amazon vice president Jeff Wilke explains. When
there is a real issue, the consequences can be harsh on the employees
responsible for the issue. There is an official system within Amazon that
ranks the severities of its internal emergencies. A Sev-5 would be a
relatively standard problem that engineers solve all the time while a Sev-
1 is an urgent issue that gets everyone on their toes as it requires an
immediate response. There is another level of severity that has
employees sweating just at the sight of it. Informally dubbed by the
employees, the “Sev-B” is anyone’s greatest nightmare at Amazon. Sev-B
means when an employee receives an email directly from Jeff Bezos
containing the notorious question mark. When a someone receives it, it
basically has an effect of a ticking time-bomb. They drop everything
they’re doing and give full attention to the issue that the CEO is
highlighting. Within a few hours, the employee has to prepare a formal
thorough explanation of how the problem occurred to a team leads who
will have to review the report before sending it to Bezos. It is the
company’s way to ensure that the customer’s voice is always heard inside
Amazon.

Bezos always moves faster, makes his employees work harder, and
pursues both significant innovations and small ones. The superb image for
Amazon is not just the everything store, but ultimately the everything
company. The future has many things in store for Amazon. They still
haven’t achieved next-day or even same-day delivery for Prime members
and they are still set to expand their grocery service Amazon Fresh
beyond Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Jeff Bezos expects
Amazon’s mass expansion to as many of countries as possible. Also,
wants their customers to eliminate the need to buy products from
manufacturers, by using 3D printer technologies to manufacture their own
and so on.
It is unknown whether Jeff Bezos’s wild ideas and an active imagination
are rooted in his early love for science fiction or it is just his personality
trait. Bezos is known for thinking outside the box, re-shaping the box, or
tossing it in the trash altogether. From revolutionizing the way we buy
and read books, to creating a private spaceflight company aimed for the
people, to launching a plan for the use of drones in package delivery,
Bezos always challenges the norm. He believes that breaking away from
the pack and making these extraordinary decisions is what truly leads to
innovation. It is the sole element that all successful leaders seem to
possess. Jeff Bezos will only get bigger, and his innovations wilder until
either he decides to stop, or there is no one left to stop him.

Jeff and his wife MacKenzie Bezos have four children, three sons and one
daughter adopted from China.

Jeff and his wife MacKenzie Bezos at the annual conference at the Sun Valley, Idaho
Resort, July 12, 2013.