Jeffrey Preston Bezos (; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon, the world's largest online shopping retailer.
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 Street in 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 Internet merchant of books and has expanded to a variety of products and services, including video and audio streaming. It is currently the world's largest Internet sales online 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 by founding aerospace company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin started test flights to space in 2015 and has planned to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight in 2018. He purchased The Washington Post newspaper in 2013 for US$250 million in cash. Bezos manages other business investments through his venture capital fund, Bezos Expeditions.
On July 27, 2017, he briefly became the world's wealthiest person when he accumulated an estimated net worth of just over $90 billion. His wealth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24 after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%. He was formally designated the wealthiest person in the world on March 6, 2018 with a registered net worth of $112 billion by Forbes, becoming the first centi-billionaire.
Video Jeff Bezos
Early life and education
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and father Ted Jorgensen, a bike shop owner and Chicago native. At the time of her son's birth, Jacklyn was a seventeen-year-old high school student. After divorcing Ted Jorgensen, Jacklyn married Miguel "Mike" Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike Bezos adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose surname was then changed to Bezos. The family moved to Houston, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he received a degree from the University of New Mexico. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.
Bezos' maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque. Gise retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. Bezos' maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (née Strait), through whom he is a cousin of country singer George Strait. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas and over the generations acquired a 25,000-acre (101 km2 or 39 miles2) ranch near Cotulla, Texas. In later life Bezos grew this land to a 300,000-acre (1,214 km2 or 468 miles2) ranch complex.
Bezos often displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency; he once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where he attended Miami Palmetto High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida where he received a Silver Knight Award in 1982. He was high school valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. In 1986, he graduated from Princeton University with a 4.2 grade point average and Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. 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.
Maps Jeff Bezos
Business career
Early career
After graduating from Princeton, Bezos was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at a start-up financial telecommunications company called Fitel as their 11th employee; he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he was hired as a product manager at Bankers Trust months later, working there from 1988 to 1990. He worked at D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund, from 1990 to 1994 eventually serving as its fourth senior vice president, aged 30.
Amazon
In late 1993, he decided to start an online book depository that primarily dealt in exchange and marketing. He left his high paying job at D. E. Shaw to set up his new company. He founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after driving from New York to Seattle, writing up its business plan on the way. Bezos named his new company, "Amazon" after the Amazon River in South America. He withdrew an estimated $300,000 from his retirement savings and invested in Amazon. Although Amazon was just an online bookstore, he had always envisioned it going beyond the original book depository. Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he moved to take it public with an initial public offering (IPO). He warned many investors that there was a 70% chance of failure. In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the Internet would overtake market competition from larger retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble. In 1998, Bezos advocated for enterprise diversification by initiating the sale of music and video; he expanded to a variety of consumer goods by the end of that same year. Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's equity offering to finance aggressive acquisition of smaller or competing firms.
In 2002, Bezos personally launched Amazon's Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic. During late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress after revenues stagnated. Bezos borrowed $2 billion from select banks with only $350 million in holdings. After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce. In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability to turned a profit of $400 million. In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle. According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos wished to create the same flow state found in video game simulations in books; he wished readers would fully engage with books. In 2013, Bezos secured a $600 million dollar contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services. In October that year, Amazon was named the largest online shopping retailer in the world.
On Saturday, August 15, 2015, The New York Times published an article titled about Amazon's business practices. Bezos responded to his employees with a Sunday memo, rebutting the article's inferences that the company was an emotionally destitute workplace and that anyone who believed the story was true should contact him directly. In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than one million shares of his holdings in the company for $671 million, making it the largest amount of money he had ever raised in a sale of his Amazon holdings.
On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares at a value of $756.7 million. On January 19, 2018, his holdings in Amazon stock appreciated to slightly over $109 billion, when he began to sell stock to raise cash for other enterprises, in particular, Blue Origin. On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion. Bezos initiated wide-spread hiring sprees across company distribution centers a year previous, taking on 130,000 new employees. Due to the proliferation of Alibaba in China, Bezos has continuously expressed interest in expanding Amazon across India. In March 2018, Bezos dispatched Amit Agarwal, Amazon's point person, to the country, with $5.5 billion to localize operations throughout their supply chain routes. Later in the month, the Trump Administration accused Amazon-and Bezos in particular-of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices. The comments stripped 9% from Amazon's share value and reduced Bezos' personal net worth by $10.7 billion on March 29. Despite the accusations, most media outlets called the comments false, inaccurate, or mischaracterizing.
Blue Origin
In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company. Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel, and the development of human life in the solar system. Upon graduating high school, his valedictorian tyrian speech was covered by a 1982 Miami Herald interview wherein he expressed an interest in build and develop hotels, amusement parks and colonies for human beings in orbit. The 18-year-old Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion.
Blue Origin was kept secret for a few years; it became publicly known only in 2006 when it purchased a large amount of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility. After the company entered 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. 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 set back, news outlets noted how far the company went from its founding-to-date in advancing spaceflight. In May 2013, Bezos met with Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Galactic, in 2013 to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies.
In 2015, Bezos announced a new orbital launch vehicle under development for late-2010s first flight. He indicated that his ambitions in space are not location dependent--Mars, Lunar, asteroidal, etc. Later in November, Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle successfully flew to space, reaching its planned test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before executing a vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas. Despite maintaining his rocket company with a veil of secrecy, he allowed select journalists to visit, tour, and take photos of his facility in 2016. He has repeatedly called for increased inter-space energy and industrial manufacturing to decrease the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.
Blue Origin announced in early 2017 an extensive flight test program of New Shepard which expects to begin carrying test passengers throughout the year. In December 2017, New Shepard successfully flew and landed test passengers amending and pushing its human space travel start date into late 2018. 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. In September 2017, he added that he hoped to colonize the solar system and a month later he sold about $1 billion in Amazon stock to finance expansionary projects for his rocket company.
The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. In order to execute the sale, Bezos established Nash Holdings, a limited liability holding company that legally owns the paper. The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings took control. Although The New York Times is typically referred to as the newspaper of record, Bezos expressed an interest in giving his paper's content for free in local American newspapers in an effort to challenge the The New York Times' position. 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. In January 2016, Bezos set out to reinvent the paper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software. Some reporters, media outlets, and politicians have expressed concern about a potential conflict of interest between Bezos and the paper. Accusations of Bezos unfairly controlling the paper's content have been dismissed by Bezos, the editorial board, and most media outlets. Since his purchase of the paper in 2013, the first profitable year was in 2016 after a surge in online-only readership.
Bezos Expeditions
Bezos makes personal investments through his venture capital vehicle, Bezos Expeditions. 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. He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life-extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging. Bezos is involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, Grail, Juno Therapeutics, and ZocDoc. In January 2018, an announcement of Bezos' role within a new, unnamed healthcare company was released. This venture is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway.
Public image
The public persona and personality of Jeff Bezos has been described by Nellie Bowles of The New York Times as that of "a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan". During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare. He favored diverting Amazon profits back into the company in lieu of allocating it amongst shareholders in the form of dividends. His doing so projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon's. During a 1999 60 Minutes documentary, footage showed Bezos working on a desk that was built by repurposing a door onto four wooden blocks. While working in early manifestations of Amazon's headquarters, as a multi-billionaire, Bezos hung his clothes on a rack in his office and drove a 1996 Honda Accord. Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy, often wearing ill-fitting clothing and making a variety of social missteps. During the late 1990s, Bezos stated that he ate a whole can of buttered Pillsbury biscuits every morning before his wife intervened and spoke to him about nutrition.
Bezos was seen by the public as needlessly quantitative and data-driven. 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." Early profiles of him described him as tyrannical and passionate about projects he either started or managed. 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. Studies involving former Amazon employees have noted interactions with Bezos as Darwinian in nature but praised the dynamic for maintaining a well-run company. Bezos has been stereotyped as a notoriously opportunistic go-getter who had little concern for obstacles and externalities. This depiction has been challenged by Bezos himself, his wife, Amazon employees, and the public as a mischaracterization. Throughout the 2000s, he was cartooned and parodied for his socially awkward demeanor and penchant for aggressive business tactics.
Sometime during the early 2010s, while his reputation for imperialistic business practices solidified, his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing, weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to spend his money liberally. His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company. His penchant for going to the gym and healthy dieting has drawn considerable public attention. Shortly after Bezos attended the 2017 Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, a picture outlining his physique was quickly shared across the internet becoming viral within the span of one day. The photo shows Bezos wearing a performance vest with aviator sunglasses, resembling multiple action movie stars. The image was converted into an Internet meme shortly after and photoshopped into action movie posters alongside Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel as well as on to various greenscreen backgrounds. The meme was inducted into Know Your Meme as "swole Jeff Bezos". More than one thousand derivative memes were estimated to have been created during July 2017. His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture. Starting in 2017, he was parodied as being supernatural and akin to an enterprising super villain. His physical appearance has been characterized with a height of 5? 7? (1.70 m) to 5? 8? (1.73 m), a shaved head, and a built physicality. His lifestyle also contributes to his public image. According to numerous descriptions of his daily routine, he wakes up naturally between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. without the aid of an alarm clock. In addition to frequenting food trucks, he is known to eat exotic foods such as breakfast octopus and roasted iguana. During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business related expenses. He purchased a former textile museum as a private residence in Washington D.C. in 2016 for $23 million, while maintaining a $24 million residence in Beverly Hills, California, and one of the largest ranches in the country (in the southwest). His liberal personal spending and lack of philanthropy drew a negative response with the public from 2016 to 2018.
Leadership style
While working at D. E. Shaw and during the early years of Amazon, Bezos used what he called a "regret-minimization framework". He described this life philosophy by stating: "When I'm 80, am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes." During the 1990s and early 2000s at Amazon, he was characterized as trying to quantify all aspects of running the company, often listing employees on spreadsheets and basing executive decisions on data. To push Amazon forward, Bezos developed the mantra "Get Big Fast", which spoke to the company's need to scale its operations and establish market dominance. He printed the slogan on t-shirts distributed among his employees.
Bezos uses the term "work-life harmony" instead of the more standard work-life balance because he believes balance implies that you can have one and not the other. He believes that work and home life are interconnected, informing and calibrating each other. Bezos does not schedule early morning meetings and enforces a two pizza rule-a preference for meetings to be small enough to where two pizzas can feed everyone in the board room. He is said to meet with Amazon investors for a total of only six hours a year. Starting in 1998, Bezos publishes an annual letter for Amazon shareholders wherein he frequently refers to five principles: focus on customers not competitors, take risks for market leadership, facilitate staff morality, build a company culture, and empower people.
Recognition
His first major award was given to Bezos in 1999 when he was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.
In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune. He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of The Business Council for 2011 and 2012. In 2014, he was ranked the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. He has also figured in Fortune's list of 50 great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015. In September 2016, Bezos was awarded the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, which earned him $250,000, which he donated to the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial pathway for human space flight". In March 2018, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin.
Wealth
Jeff Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997, aged 33, after raising $54 million through Amazon's initial public offering (IPO). He was first included on Forbes' The World's Billionaires list in 1999 with a registered net worth of $10.1 billion, aged 35. His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later, a 40.5% drop. His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion. He lost $500 million the following year, which brought his net worth to his lowest point at $1.5 billion. He rebounded adding $1 billion to his overall net worth in 2003. The following year, his net worth increased by 104% to $2.5 billion. In 2005, his wealth decreased to $4.1 billion. He added $200 million to his net worth a year later, nearly doubling it to $8.7 billion in 2007. In 2008, partly due to the financial crisis, he lost $500 million. A year later, an economic recession would further erode his wealth by 17.7% to $6.8 billion. His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010 leaving him with $12.6 billion. This percentage increase ascended him to the 43rd spot on the ranking from 68th.
In 2011, his wealth was estimated to be $18.1 billion, growing 43.6%. His net worth increased to $23.2 billion the year after, and again to $28.9 billion in 2013. After a rumor broke out that Amazon was developing a smartphone, his net worth rose to $30.5 billon despite Bloomberg publishing multiple pieces stating that his wealth declined in 2014. A year later Bezos entered the Top Ten nearly doubling his net worth to a grand total of 50.3 billion. Bezos rose to be the 5th richest person in the world hours before market close the previous day; he gained $7 billon in one hour. By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion. However just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion to $66.5 billion unofficially ranking him the third richest person in the world behind Warren Buffett. After sporadic jumps in Amazon's share price, in July 2017 he briefly unseated Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world.
He would continue to sporadically surpass Gates throughout the month of October 2017 after Amazon's share price fluctuated. His net worth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%. When the 2017 list was issued, Bezos' net worth was registered at $72.8 billion, adding $27.6 billion from the previous year. He was officially ranked as the third wealthiest person in the world up from the 5th spot in 2016. His wealth's rapid growth from 2016 to 2017 sparked a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a controlled, reduced time scale. On October 10, 2017, he made an estimated $6.24 billion in 5 minutes, slightly less than the entire economic output of Kyrgyzstan.
On March 6, 2018, he was officially designated the wealthiest person in the world with a registered net worth of $112 billion. He unseated Bill Gates ($90 billion) who was $6 billion ahead of Warren Buffett ($84 billion), ranked third. He is considered the first centi-billionaire (not adjusted for inflation). According to Maxim, his wealth, in 2017-18 terms, equaled that of 2.7 million Americans. Bezos increased his net worth by $33.6 billion from January 2017 to January 2018. This increase outstripped the economic development (in GDP terms) of more than 96 countries around the world. During the 24 hours of March 9, Bezos earned $230,000 every 60-seconds. The Motley Fool estimated that had Bezos not sold any of his shares from its original IPO (in 1997), his net worth would sit at $181 billion in 2018.
Personal life
While Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in 1992, he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle. MacKenzie was a research associate at the firm at the time and they married a year later. In 1994, they moved to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. Bezos and his wife are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.
On March 6, 2003, Bezos was flying his helicopter through his ranch in Texas when he was involved in a crash. The wind blew his small helicopter off-kilter, which prompted the pilot to make an emergency landing. After the chopper landed, one of its propellers caught on a cedar tree, which caused the frame of the helicopter to break. Bezos sustained minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital on the same day. Recalling the event, Bezos stated: "The biggest takeaway is: Avoid helicopters whenever possible! They're not as reliable as a fixed-wing aircraft."
In 2016, Bezos played a Starfleet official in the movie Star Trek Beyond, later joining the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening.
Politics
Jeff Bezos has been profiled as a Democrat, Libertarian, and a Libertarian Democrat. David Weigel has written that Bezos supports low taxes and social liberalism. His political donations have been mostly-but not exclusively-to Democratic Party candidates, movements, and politicians. According to public campaign finance records, Bezos has donated to the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two U.S. Senators from Washington. He has also donated to U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Spencer Abraham, U.S. senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues. Bezos is a supporter of legalizing same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ movement. During a 2010 campaign to install an income tax on high net worth individuals in Washington, he donated $100,000 towards a movement against it. Bezos has donated to Amazon's political action committee (PAC), which has given evenly to Democrats and Republicans.
Despite Bezos' criticism of U.S. president Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election, he was asked to join Trump's Defense Innovation Board, an advisory council to improve the technology used by the Defense Department. Bezos passed on the offer and declined to comment as to why. Trump has alluded to potential conflicts of interest between Amazon, the Washington Post, and Bezos. Trump accused Bezos using his business exploits to avoid corporate taxation, gain political influence, and undermine his presidency by spreading what he referred to as fake news. Bezos has repeatedly joked about using his rocket company to send Donald Trump into outer space.
Philanthropy
Although secretive about his plans, Jeff Bezos supports his philanthropic efforts through direct donations, non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions, and other charitable organizations. Through Bezos Expeditions, he has funded the Bezos Center for Innovation at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry for $10 million and Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute for $15 million. He personally donated $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in 2010 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Bezos also donated $800,000 to Worldreader, a non-profit, founded by a former Amazon employee.
In 2015, he funded the recovery of two Saturn V first-stage Rocketdyne F-1 engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. They were positively identified as belonging to the Apollo 11 mission's S-1C stage in July 2013. The engine is currently on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.
On June 15, 2017, he sent a message on Twitter asking for ideas for philanthropy: "I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time -- working on the long term". Bezos has notably not signed The Giving Pledge, a promise by the wealthiest of the world to give at least half of their money to charitable organizations. On May 23, 2017, he gave $1 million to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the largest single gift received by the organization. The committee provides pro bono legal services to protect the rights of American journalists.
In January 2018, he made a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States when they were minors.
See also
- List of Princeton University alumni
- List of Time Person of the Year recipients
Notes
References
Sources
- Robinson, Tom (2010). Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com Architect. ABDO Publishing. ISBN 9781604537598.
External links
- Jeff Bezos at Bloomberg L.P.
- Jeff Bezos at TED
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose
- Jeff Bezos on IMDb
- Works by or about Jeff Bezos in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- "Jeff Bezos collected news and commentary". The New York Times.
- Bezos Expeditions
Source of article : Wikipedia
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