THE ONLY TRILLIONAIRE - Jeffrey Preston Bezos (Jeff Bezos)
Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of the e-commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.
Born in 1964 in 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, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the Internet's biggest success stories. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post, and in 2017 Amazon acquired Whole Foods.
Jeff Bezos' Family
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. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.
Jeff Bezos' Education
Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.
Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child.
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.
Career in Finance
After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos became D.E. Shaw's youngest vice president.
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.
Bezos opened Amazon.com, 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 Microstations.
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 $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup 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.
As part of Bezos' 2018 annual shareholder letter, the media tycoon said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. By September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company to ever hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.
At the end of 2018, Amazon announced it was raising the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has still been criticized for its working conditions and grueling pace, with workers protesting during Prime Day in July 2019.
Jeff Bezos | |
|---|---|
_(cropped).jpg) Bezos in January 2018 | |
| Born | Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen January 12, 1964 Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Education | Princeton University (BSE) |
| Occupation |
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| Years active | 1986–present |
| Known for | Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin |
| Net worth | US$180 billion (July 30, 2020)[1] |
| Title | CEO and President of Amazon |
| Spouse(s) | ( m. 1993; div. 2019) |
| Children | 4 |
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