Jeff Bezos Biography
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Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, computer engineer, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, where he previously served as the president and CEO.
CHILDHOOD
Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964) in New Mexico Albuquerque. The son of Jacklyn and Theodore Jorgensen.
At the time of Jeffrey’s birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19 years old. Theodore Jorgensen had ancestry from Denmark and was born in Chicago to a family of Baptists.
After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing Jeffrey along as a baby.
After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel “Mike” Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jeffrey, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.
EDUCATION
Jeffrey Bezos attended a Montessori school in New Mexico when he was two years old. Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.
Bezos displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency, and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings away.
The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School While Bezos was in high school, he worked at McDonald’s as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.
See Also: Elon Musk Biography
Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was a high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar. and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.
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”.
In 1986, he graduated 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; While at Princeton, Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton’s 11 eating clubs.
In addition, he was elected and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS)
Jeff Bezos Amazon Career
In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore. 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.
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.
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.
At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with “A” would appear faster when customers conducted online searches.
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.
He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.
Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.
Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public in response to critical reports, Bezos maintained that the growth of the Internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers.
See Also: Tim Cook Biography
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.
Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company’s 1997 equity offering to finance the aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors. In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.
In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic After the company almost went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and cut off 14% of the workforce.
In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability made a profit of $400 million in 2013, Bezos secured a $600-million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services.
In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.
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 a few Amazon stocks.
As of August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million. A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers.
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, On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial.
On February 1, 2018, Amazon recorded its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion. Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often expressed interest in expanding Amazon into India.
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
MARRIAGE
1992, Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan when he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later.
See Also: Mark Zuckerberg Biography
In 1994, they moved across the country to Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. Bezos and his now ex-wife MacKenzie are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.
On January 9, 2019, Bezos and MacKenzie announced on Twitter their intent to divorce after a “long period” of separation.
On April 4, 2019, the divorce was finalized, with Bezos keeping 75% of the couple’s Amazon stock and MacKenzie getting the remaining 25% in Amazon stock. , Bezos would still keep all of the couple’s voting rights
NETWORTH
Having a net worth of around US$176 billion as of February 2022, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to Bloomberg‘s Billionaires Index and the third-wealthiest person according to Forbes.
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Jeff Bezos Wife
MacKenzie Scott Born on 7 April 1970 is an American novelist and philanthropist. She is known for her involvement in Amazon, as well as her now-dissolved marriage to Jeff Bezos.
As of November 2021, she has a net worth of US$62.2 billion, owing to a 4% stake in Amazon, the company Bezos founded.
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