Jeff Bezos was born on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States, and is a leading American entrepreneur and a significant contributor to the advancement of electronic commerce. As the founder and the former chief executive officer of the largest online retailing company in the world, Amazon.com, Inc. With his vision, Bezos guided the company from its creation as an online bookseller to its status as the world’s leading Internet retailer. He also played the strategic role in Amazon strategically moving into virtually all consumer goods categories. Most significantly, under Bezos’s leadership, Amazon not only transformed the online selling of goods but also changed the metrics of electronic business and consumer relations, making it a prototype for online buying throughout the world.
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, known as Jeff Bezos is also an alumnus of the distinguished Princeton University where he obtained a degree in Engineering. Bezos is one of the most recognized and successful businesspeople. He is the founder of Amazon and the president and CEO of the company since its establishment. During his time, he transformed Amazon into the biggest e-commerce and the largest cloud service provider in the world. He also owns Blue Origin company, The Washington Post company, and Bezos expeditions company, Bezos earth fund, Bezos academy company. Specifically, Bezos becomes the second richest man in the world with a total estimated worth of $ 211 billion as of June 16, 2024.
Bezos’s mother was 17 years old and still in high school when Bezos was born while his father was a small bike shop owner. In 1968, after his parent’s divorce, his mother remarried to Cuban immigrant Miguel ‘Mike’ Bezos, who formally adopted Jeffrey, and consequently, the last name became Bezos. The family later relocated to Houston, Texas where he joined the River Oaks Elementary School. They later moved to Miami, Florida where he joined Miami Palmetto High School. He was a short-order line cook at McDonalds during his high school years. The same year, he received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University.
Jeff Bezos's education played an important role in the development of his passion for innovation. He spent his fourth to sixth grade at River Oaks Elementary School in Houston, where he had the most influential role model, his grandfather. A young Bezos got to work repairing windmills and laying down pipes during his summers at his grandfather’s ranch. As a high school student, Bezos established his first business, the Dream Institute, which was an educational summer camp for fourth to sixth graders in which he taught them literature and other subjects.
Later, his family relocated to Florida, and he finished his high school studies at Palmetto Senior High School. In 1982, he was enrolled in the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida during which he was acknowledged as both the National Merit Scholar and the recipient of the Silver Knight Award. Owing to his interest in computers and technology, Bezos changed from physics to computing and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.
After graduating high school in 1982, he was initially an English Literature student but changed his major to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He had a penchant for software while in school, and he led several projects in his course of study before gaining a 4.2 GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, and Tau Beta Pi academic honors. He was also the President of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) organization during his time at Princeton University.
Upon graduation, Bezos had several opportunities to work in Wall Street investment companies. He began his career at Fitel, where he assisted in designing a computer network for international finance before moving to Banker’s Trust in 1988 to manage investment portfolios. He later worked at D. E. Shaw & Company as a financial analyst and was promoted to a vice president position and was later promoted to the position of senior vice president at the same firm. His exposure to managing online investments during the evolution of the usage of the internet pressed him on the button to become an entrepreneur. In 1994, Bezos left D. E. Shaw to move to Seattle and begin building his new company, an online bookstore that would eventually become Amazon. He listed the first book on the site in July 1995.
Bezos Expeditions has always shifted significantly toward technology. Almost three-quarters of his family office investments are in technology; the second largest sector in his portfolio is consumer goods, which is 16%, and the third one is financial services and manufacturing, both occupying 13% of his investment. But now, AI appears to be his main area of concern.
In July 2024, he participated in US$300 million in Series A funding to Skild AI, which is an Artificial Intelligence technology firm dealing with AI solutions in machines as well as robotics devices.
In April 2024, The Bezos Earth Fund shortlisted an AI for the Climate and Nature Grand Challenge and pledged to provide grants of up to $100 million. It aims to find out how the current AI technology could potentially assist in climate change and nature conservation, thus encouraging closer cooperation between organizations that are directly involved in implementing environmental projects and directors of major AI companies.
In February 2024, Bezos Expeditions invested in Figure AI, the humanoid robot company, along with Nvidia and Microsoft. The venture round was accounted for at about $675 million on average.
In January 2024, the founder and the executive chairman of Amazon invested in the US$73.6 million Series B round of Perplexity, an AI search engine company. He also put money in a US$63 million follow-on round in April. Bezos Expeditions’ January investment may be worth two times more by April at least because the company detailed that it has increased its value to between US$2-US$3 billion.
Amazon has also been investing heavily in the AI field. The company intends to put over $100B for reference and invested $4B in Anthropic, the artificial safety and research company.
Bezos has already submitted a plan to sell more Amazon stock to reduce his stake in the company by an additional $5 billion this year following the divestiture of $8 billion earlier this year. After having more than $13 billion in cash, Bezos will be able to invest even more in a new AI revolution.
Jeff Bezos has accomplished immense business success as a founder and the former CEO of Amazon, which he began in 1994 as an internet-based bookseller. Thus, Mr. Bezos strengthened Amazon’s position as a global e-commerce giant and evolved it into a cloud services provider with Amazon Web Services. Bezos’s vision and efforts helped Amazon attain a market capitalization of over a trillion dollars and he was awarded the first title of the centibillionaire. Furthermore, his investments in the space industry through Blue Origin and media through The Washington Post have impacted most of the business realm.
Here are the sector-wise Business and financial achievements:
In 1994, Jeff Bezos, inspired by the Internet's rapid growth, founded Amazon.com with a $10,000 investment. Initially operating from a garage, Bezos, his wife, and two programmers conducted meetings at a local Barnes & Noble. Launched in July 1995, Amazon quickly expanded its book sales across the U.S. and 45 countries. Despite a modest initial capital raise and projections, Amazon exceeded expectations, achieving $1.64 billion in sales by 1999. With $8 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins in 1996 and a successful IPO in 1997, Amazon's sales soared to over $3 billion by 2001. The company's stock surged 450% from January 2016 to January 2021 but faced a downturn through early 2023 before rebounding. Bezos, owning 12.3% of Amazon, holds significant wealth from his over 1 billion shares as of 2023.
Jeff Bezos holds significant investments in real estate, including a 165,000-acre ranch in Texas used by his aerospace company, Blue Origin, for rocket testing. His property portfolio features multimillion-dollar homes in Beverly Hills and Manhattan, with the latter enhancing Century Tower's property values. He also owns a lakeside estate in Washington, where he invested $28 million to expand the property. In 2023, Bezos acquired a $500 million yacht. Additionally, Amazon's $1.5 billion purchase of the South Lake Union headquarters in Seattle in 2012 solidified its position as a major commercial property owner, with 8.1 million square feet of office space by 2017.
Jeff Bezos has made significant charitable contributions, including funding education through the Bezos Family Foundation and donating to Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry and Princeton University. In January 2018, Bezos and his ex-wife, MacKenzie, pledged $33 million to TheDream.US to provide college scholarships for 1,000 DACA-status high school graduates, marking the largest donation ever received by the organization.
Each year, Bezos commits $1 billion to his space exploration company, Blue Origin, which, in 2016, became one of the first commercial companies to launch a reusable rocket. On July 18, 2018, Blue Origin sent the New Shepard spacecraft to a high altitude to test its safety systems.
Jeff Bezos has massively contributed to technology and media, particularly Twitter Inc. (now X Corp.), Business Insider, and Google, with his initial $250,000 investment in Google possibly being worth huge amounts today. In addition to this, he has sought to diversify his investments stepping into Zocdoc Inc., Nextdoor, Uber, and Workday Inc., which was approved by an IPO of more than $684 million. Bezos also backed Glassybaby, a candlestick producer, and in 2013, he held talks and finally purchased The Washington Post for $250 million and had it rising significantly in its audience and web traffic.
Labor Practice: Bezos has been accused of exploiting his workers, especially those in the Amazon warehouses where they work under poor wages and in terrible working conditions under extremely pressurizing working conditions. In April 2019, he declared $15 Wages for workers, but several cases of hazardous facilities were ongoing, and working hours and forced overtime hours were reported.
Philanthropy: Bezos has been accused especially by the public that he is not giving back enough to society even though he possesses a lot of wealth. However, in contrast with his ex-wife, Bezos has not signed on several occasions the ‘Just Giving’ pledge that was set by another fellow multibillionaire Bill Gates, and even after such donations such as the Bezos Earth Fund there are those who still want Bezos to give away more of his wealth.
Management Style: Bezos has been accused of managing his employees in an adversarial manner; he has been reported to be using labeling language to his workers and this has also contributed to the high level of toxicity in the company.
Media Ownership: His ownership of The Washington Post has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, particularly regarding editorial independence. Although many on the left criticize Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post's anti-Trump stance aligns him politically with those who oppose Trump.
Tax Avoidance: Bezos had no federal income tax at all for the years 2007 and 2011, something that has elicited controversy over how billionaires avoid taxes. This issue attracted appreciable attention in 2021 following the release of Bezos’ and others’ tax information in a ProPublica article raising concerns about tax justice and the duties of the super-rich.
Outbid: In June 2024, Jeff Bezos was reportedly outbid by private equity billionaire Josh Harris in his attempt to purchase the Washington Commanders, contrary to earlier claims that he was blocked by the team's former owner, Daniel Snyder. A Financial Times report clarified that Bezos's bid was simply surpassed, and an unnamed source suggested that Snyder would have considered a substantial offer from Bezos if it had been competitive enough.
Amazon Investors Sue: In August 2023, there was a shareholder derivative lawsuit filed against Jeff Bezos and other higher-ranking officials of the Amazon company for causing ‘enormous’ amounts of money to be lost through antitrust and reckless expansion. These allegations stem from the whistleblower lawsuit that accuses Bezos and the board of providing investors with wrong and misleading information on the company’s private-label business and engaging in anti-competitive practices that enable Amazon’s products against third-party sellers. This rapid expansion and mismanagement, according to reports, led to sharp drops in the company’s stock prices and heightened regulatory investigations and legal proceedings.