Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos - American technology entrepreneur and investor. He has played a role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming. Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and a model for Internet sales.

Bezos' other business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and owner of the privately-funded aerospace developer and manufacturer Blue Origin, founded in 2000, with test flights to space beginning in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions.

As of June 2016, Bezos' personal wealth is estimated to be US$63.3 billion, due in part to a recent spike in Amazon's stock price, ranking him 4th on the Forbes list of billionaires.

Childhood and Education

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000-acre (101 km or 39 miles) ranch near Cotulla. As of March 2015, Bezos was among the largest land holders in Texas. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. At an early age, he displayed mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried to dismantle his crib.

Bezos' mother Jacklyn was a teenager at the time of his birth. Her marriage to his father lasted a little more than a year. When Jeff was four, she remarried, to Miguel Bezos, a Cuban who immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old. Miguel worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married Jacklyn and legally adopted his stepson Jeff. After the wedding, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."

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 Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982. He was high school valedictorian and was a National Merit Scholar.

He attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with two Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. While at Princeton, he was elected to the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He also served as the President of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

Career

After graduating from Princeton in 1986, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. He next worked at Bankers Trust. Later on he also worked on Internet-enabled business opportunities at D. E. Shaw & Co.

amazon.com

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage. He had left his "well-paying job" at a New York City hedge fund after learning "about the rapid growth in Internet use", which coincided with a then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding that mail order catalogs were not required to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence."

Bezos is known for his attention to business details. As described by Portfolio.com, he "is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager: "an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases."

On August 15, 2015, the New York Times wrote an article entitled "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" about Amazon's business practices and Bezos responded to his employees with a Sunday memo claiming it doesn't represent the company he leads and challenged its depiction as "a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard", and to contact him directly if true.

Blue Origin

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company, partially as a result of his fascination with space travel, including an early interest in developing "space hotels, amusement parks, colonies and small cities for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth." The company was kept secret for a few years; it became publicly known only in 2006 when purchasing a sizable aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility. In a 2011 interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help enable "anybody to go into space" and stated that the company was committed to decreasing the cost and increasing the safety of spaceflight. Blue Origin is "one of several start-ups aiming to open up space travel to paying customers. Like Amazon, the company is secretive, but [in September 2011] revealed that it had lost an unmanned prototype vehicle during a short-hop test flight. Although this was a setback, the announcement of the loss revealed for the first time just how far Blue Origin's team had advanced." Bezos said that the crash was 'not the outcome that any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard.'" A profile published in 2013 described a 1982 Miami Herald interview he gave after he was named high school class valedictorian. The 18-year-old Bezos "said he wanted to build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit. 'The whole idea is to preserve the earth' he told the newspaper .... The goal was to be able to evacuate humans. The planet would become a park."

In 2013, Bezos reportedly discussed commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies with Richard Branson, multibillionaire founder of Virgin Group and Chairman of Virgin Galactic.

In 2015, Bezos further discussed the motivation for his spaceflight-related business when he 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.—"we want to go everywhere, [requiring significantly lower launch costs.] Our number-one opponent is gravity. ... The vision for Blue is pretty simple. We want to see millions of people living and working in space. That's going to take a long time. I think it's a worthwhile goal." In 2016, Bezos opened up the Blue rocket design and manufacturing facility to journalists for the first time, and gave extensive interviews that included an articulation of his vision for space, and for Blue Origin. Bezos sees space as being "chock full of resources" and foresees a "Great Inversion" where there will emerge "space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space." He sees both energy and heavy manufacturing occurring in space, having the effect of reduced pollution on Earth, in effect reducing the probability that something "bad happens to the Earth." Bezos has said that he is trying to change the fundamental cost structure of accessing space.

On November 23, 2015, 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 an historic vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas. Blue Origin is currently in an extensive flight test program of New Shepard which expects to begin carrying "test passengers" in 2017 and initiate commercial flights in 2018. Blue is currently building 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 June 2016, Bezos reiterated his long term goal to see nearly all heavy-industry manufacturing factories in space as part of a wide-ranging, but rare, interview.

The Washington Post

On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. Amazon.com is not to be involved. "This is uncharted terrain," he told the newspaper, "and it will require experimentation." Shortly after the announcement of intent to purchase, The Washington Post published a long-form profile of Bezos on August 10, 2013. The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Bezos's Nash Holdings LLC took control.

In March 2014, Bezos made his first significant change at The Washington Post and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of some number of U.S. local newspapers including The Dallas Morning News, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Bezos revealed in 2016 that he conducted no due diligence when accepting the first offer from former The Washington Post owner, Donald E. Graham.

Google

Bezos was one of the first investors in Google, investing $250,000 in 1998.

Bezos Expeditions

Some of Bezos' personal investments are managed through his company Bezos Expeditions. Companies that have been funded at least in part by Bezos Expeditions include:

    Airbnb - sharing economy
    Aviary - software (photo editing)
    Basecamp - software (project management)
    Blue Origin - space travel
    Business Insider - publishing
    Crowdrise - for-profit charitable giving platform
    Domo - software (business intelligence)
    doxo (company) - financial services
    D-Wave Systems - quantum computing
    Everfi - technology for education
    Finsphere - software (authentication)
    General Assembly - technology education
    General Fusion - sustainable energy (nuclear fusion)
    Glassybaby - supports cancer patients
    Juno Therapeutics - cancer biopharmaceuticals
    Kongregate - online games
    Linden Lab - online games (Second Life)
    Lookout - technology (mobile security)
    MakerBot Industries - 3D printers
    MFG.com - manufacturer direct marketplace
    Nextdoor - localized social networking
    Pelago - online games
    Powerset - natural-language search engine
    Pro.com - home services marketplace
    Qliance - health care
    Remitly - financial services
    Rescale - cloud computing simulations
    Rethink Robotics - manufacturing robots
    Sapphire Energy - sustainable energy (crude oil from algae)
    Skytap - cloud computing
    Stack Exchange - technology publishing
    TeachStreet - search engine to find teachers
    Twitter - social networking
    Uber - sharing economy
    Vessel - subscription video service
    Vicarious - artificial intelligence
    Workday - software for business
    Zocdoc - software (healthcare appointments)

Philanthropy

Amazon has environmental initiatives for improving its internal operations and researching climate change, has used its homepage for disaster relief fundraising, supported writers, has a Wish List functionality for non-profit donations, and Amazon Smile offers a charitable donation of 0.5% on purchases of selected items.

In July 2012, Bezos and his wife personally donated $2.5 million to pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington, which was successfully passed.

Non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions include:

    First full-scale prototype Clock of the Long Now, designed to last 10,000 years. - $42 million
    Bezos Center for Innovation at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry - $10 million
    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.
    Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute - $15 million
    Bezos Family Foundation, an educational charity

The foundation gave $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in 2010 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Bezos also donated $800,000 to Worldreader, founded by a former Amazon employee.

Recognition

He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999. 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 is a member of the Executive Committee of The Business Council for 2011 and 2012.

As of October 22, 2015, according to Bloomberg News, Bezos is the third richest person in US, with a net worth of $53 billion.

As of June 2, 2016, according to Forbes, Bezos is listed as the 4th wealthiest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$63.3 billion. He was ranked the second best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review, after Steve Jobs of Apple.

He has also figured in Fortune's list of Fifty great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015.

Criticism

Under Bezos' direction, Amazon has been criticized as "stingy" in its corporate giving practices.

Journalist Shawn McCoy contrasted the philanthropic practices of Amazon and Bezos with the comparatively more generous Microsoft (also based in Seattle) and fellow billionaire Bill Gates. Some found Bezos more similar to Steve Jobs, who was skeptical of philanthropy and made no known major donations.

He was named World's Worst Boss by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), at their World Congress, in May 2014. In making the award, Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the ITUC, said "Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the American corporate model..."

An article that ran in the New York Times described working for Bezos and Amazon in the offices as a grueling and inhumane experience with many employees regularly being terminated or quitting.

Personal life

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called his "regret minimization framework," which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the Internet business boom during that time. In 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a business plan for what would eventually become Amazon.com.

Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as "Cadabra" on July 5, 1994. Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver". The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary, and settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different" just as he planned for his store to be; the Amazon river, he noted was by far the "biggest" river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest in the world. Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world." Additionally, a name beginning with "A" was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized.

Since June 19, 2000, Amazon's logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile.

After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online. He narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products which included: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, due to the large world-wide demand for literature, the low price points for books, along with the huge number of titles available in print. Amazon was originally founded in Bezos' garage in Bellevue, Washington.

The company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book (now called Ingram Content Group), along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon. Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram. In the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries. Within two months, Amazon's sales were up to $20,000/week. While the largest brick and mortar bookstores and mail order catalogs might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could "carry" several times more, since it would have a practically unlimited virtual (not actual) warehouse: those of the actual product makers/suppliers.

Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington. In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on Amazon.com: Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. In October 1995, the company announced itself to the public. In 1996, it was reincorporated in Delaware. Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at a price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s).

Amazon's initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This "slow" growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term. When the dot-com bubble burst at the start of the 21st century, destroying many e-companies in the process, Amazon survived, and grew on past the bubble burst to become a huge player in online sales. It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This profit margin, though extremely modest, proved to skeptics that Bezos' unconventional business model could succeed. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping.

Barnes & Noble sued Amazon on May 12, 1997, alleging that Amazon's claim to be "the world's largest bookstore" was false. Barnes and Noble asserted, "[It] isn't a bookstore at all. It's a book broker." The suit was later settled out of court, and Amazon continued to make the same claim. Walmart sued Amazon on October 16, 1998, alleging that Amazon had stolen Walmart's trade secrets by hiring former Walmart executives. Although this suit was also settled out of court, it caused Amazon to implement internal restrictions and the reassignment of the former Walmart executives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com