Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is an American internet and aerospace entrepreneur, media proprietor, and investor. He is best known as the founder, chief executive officer, and president of Amazon. The first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after hi net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In September 2018, Forbes described him as "far richer than anyone else on the planet" as he added $1.8 billion to his net worth when Amazon became the second company in history to reach a market cap of $1 trillion.

 Early life

Jeffrey Preston Jorgenson was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. He was born to Jacklyn Jorgenson and Ted Jorgenson. At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17 year old high school student and his father was a bike shop owner. After Jacklyn divorced Ted, she married Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four year old Jorgenson whose surname was then changed to Bezos.
 
Education

Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Bezos then 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. He attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 grade point average and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science.

Job life

After Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a fin-tech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. 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 the age of 30. 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.

Business career

Amazon

Bezos opened Amazon.com, initially known as Cadabra, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his site. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage; they eventually expanded operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Micro-stations. He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or so bankrupt. 

Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore , Bezos had always planned to expand to other products. The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,00 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup team had envisioned.

Amazon.com went public in 1997, leading many market analysis 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 diversity Amazon's offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998 amd 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.

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. In 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 million in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes.
"We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen," Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the Moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Washington post

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines worldwide when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company's chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham.

Wealth and Salary

As of August 2019, both Bloomberg and Forbes estimated Bezos' net worth at $110 billion, or more than 1.9 million times the median American household income. Bezos topped Forbes' list of  wealthiest people in the world in both 2018 and 2019.

Bezos has earned the same $81,840 salary at Amazon every year since 1998 and has never taken a stock award. However, his shares of Amazon have made him a very wealthy man. One analysis of Bezos' 2018 stock earnings had him taking home roughly $260 million per day.

In July 2017, Bezos first 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. By January 2018, Bezos had eclipsed Gates' previous wealth record with a net worth of $105.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. In inflation-adjusted terms, however, Gates was wealthier than Bezos in the late 1990s. The massive fortunes of American business tycoons John Rockfeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford would also surpass Bezos' wealth.

Personal life

In 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. In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. He and his ex-wife MacKenzie are the parents of four children: three sons and one daughter adopted from China.

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. 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.

Quotes

 1. "You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."
 2. "When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?"
 3. "If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new."
 4. "In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story."
 5. "Failure and invention are inseparable twins."
 6. "One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."
 7. "Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy they're given after all. Choices can be hard."
  8. "Life is to short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."
  9.  "It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work."
10. "If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness."