Hyper-intelligent, ultra-driven, and obsessed with detail, he is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books.
Conquering the internet and becoming one of the world’s richest men would be enough for most, but this entrepreneur’s long term plan has always been something even grander: to establish a permanent human colony in space.
He is also a philanthropist through his Bezos Family Foundation, which is run by his mother to benefit childhood education. In 2012, he donated $2.5m to a campaign supporting gay marriage
Childhood
Jeffrey Preston “Jeff” Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a teenage mother. Bezos’s parents were married less than a year, and when Bezos was four years old his mother married his step-father, a Cuban immigrant.
As a child, Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house.
Princeton University is his alma mater.
Career
After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment firm D.E. Shaw.Though his job was lucrative, 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, originally “cadabra” in 1994 in his two-bedroom house after inviting 300 friends to beta test the site.
In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries. In two months, it had sales of $20,000 a week.
Bezos and his team continued improving the site, introducing such unheard-of features as one-click shopping, customer reviews, and e-mail order verification. He continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings as well with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships.
In 2007, Amazon.com released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader. That same year, Bezos also set his sights far, far, away, announcing his investment in Blue Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company that is developing technologies to offer space travel to paying customers.
In 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash.
Recognition
Bezos was named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999.
In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of The Year by Fortune.
He was ranked the second best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.