BEZOS
Jeff

Jeff Bezos (01.12.1964) 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.

Early Life

Jeffrey Preston Bezos né Jorgensen was brought into the world on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensen were married for less than a year. When Bezos was 4, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

Jeff Bezos childhood

He graduated with honors 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 installing electrical devices around his house when he was a child.

Career in Finance

After finishing Princeton, Bezos found work at some 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 profitable, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the arising world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, came to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the Internet market by opening an online bookshop.

Founder and CEO of Amazon.com

Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his website. In the months leading up to launch, some 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 business was very fast. . With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the US 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 went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their e-commerce sites. 2 years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming a 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.

Jeff Bezos featured on the cover of Time magazine as its “Person of the Year,” 1999

While many dot.coms of the early '90s went bankrupt, Amazon was prosperous 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.

Amazon Instant Video & Amazon Studios

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.

Bezos introduced several new programs with the launch of Amazon Studios in 2013. The company achieved great success in 2014 with the critically acclaimed "Transparent" and "Mozart in the Jungle".

The company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee's Chirak, in 2015.

In 2016, Bezos stopped in front of the camera for a cameo role of an alien in the movie "Star Trek Beyond". A fan of "Star Trek" since childhood, Without oos is listed as an official of Starfleet in the film's credits on IMDb.

Bezos in Star Trek

Kindle E-Reader

Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections, in 2007.

According to ABC News, Bezos said

"We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,"

Amazon Drones

In early December 2013, Bezos made abridgements when he revealed an original, experimental initiative by Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said

"These drones would be able to carry things weighing up to five pounds and be capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center".

Whole Foods

Bezos was waiting for the food delivery market, and in 2017, Amazon announced that it had acquired the Whole Foods grocery store chain for $ 13.7 billion in cash.

The company began offering Amazon Prime customers discounts in stores and grocery delivery in just two hours, depending on the market. That's why Wal mart and Rogers started offering mail delivery to their customers.

Owner of 'The Washington Post'

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines around the world when he bought the Washington Post and other publications associated with its parent company, the Washington Post Co., for $ 250 million.

This transaction marked the end of four generations of rule over the Post company by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company's chairman and CEO, and his niece, Post publisher Catherine Graham.

"The post office could survive under the company's ownership and be profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than just survive. I'm not saying that this guarantees success, but it gives us a much better chance of success."

In a statement to the Post staff on August 5, Bezos wrote:

"The values of the Post do not need to be changed. Of course, there will be changes in this post in the coming years. This is important and would have happened with or without the new owner. The Internet is transforming almost all elements of the news business: it shortens news cycles, undermines long-term sources of income and creates opportunities for new types of competition, some of which practically do not bear the costs of news collection."

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper's technical staff (hundreds of these employees published an open letter to their boss asking for higher wages and improved benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted of several revelations, including that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied about his contacts with Russians, which led to his resignation.

Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post

By 2016, the organization declared that it was winning. The following year, advertising revenue totaled more than $ 100 million, while revenue grew by double digits for three consecutive years. According to comScore, Amazon soon surpassed the New York Times digital in the number of unique users: as of June 2019, 86.4 million unique users.

Blue Origin

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, 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 billion 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. Bezos said,

“We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen”.

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.

Bezos Day One Fund

In 2018, Bezos launched the Bezos Day One foundation, which focuses on "funding existing non-profit organizations that help homeless families and creating a network of new non-profit first-level preschools in low-income communities." The announcement came a year after Bezos asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune.

Bezos founded the organization with his ex-wife Mackenzie before their divorce, and he donated $ 2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit organization. As one of the richest people in the world, Bezos has been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of charitable efforts.

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. 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."

Earth Fund

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund "scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

Bezos in 2020

Wife and Kids

Bezos met MacKenzie Tuttle when they both worked at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills to fund her writing career. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married shortly thereafter in 1993.

MacKenzie was an integral part of the founding and success of Amazon, helping create Amazon's first business plan and serving as the company's first accountant. Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband. A novelist by trade, training under Toni Morrison during her college years at Princeton University, MacKenzie published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright, in 2005, and her second novel, Traps, in 2013.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Bezos and MacKenzie divorced in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Bezos' stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his stake at nearly $110 billion and MacKenzie's at more than $37 billion. MacKenzie announced that she planned to give away at least half of her wealth to charity.

Bezos and MacKenzie have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

Bezos and his family

Personal Life

Right after Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie in January 2019, The National Enquirer published an 11-page exposé of the media mogul's extramarital affair with television host Lauren Sanchez.

Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into the motives of The National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. The following month, in a lengthy post on Medium, Bezos accused AMI of threatening to publish explicit photos unless he backed off the investigation.

"Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won't participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks and corruption," Bezos wrote. "I prefer to stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out."

In that same post, Bezos suggested that there was possibly a link between AMI's actions and the Saudi Arabian government. Later, a forensic analysis of Bezos' phone revealed that it was hacked after the mogul received a video via WhatsApp from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Sanchez divorced her husband in April 2019. She and Bezos made their first public appearance as a couple that July at Wimbledon.