The American businessman began his life in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the 12th of January 1964 as Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, the son of Jacklyn and Ted. The mother’s side of the family lived in Texas and had a large ranch close to Cotulla, while the grandfather was the regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Due to the early retirement of the grandfather, Jeff was able to spend many summers working with him and thus he realized he was very handy when it came to mechanical things. According to some sources he even tried to dismantle his crib as a toddler. The parents were young and thus the marriage was unsuccessful, lasting only a year.
Jacklyn remarried when Jeff was four years old with Miguel Bezos who legally adopted the stepson. The new family moved to Houston, Texas after the wedding when Miguel got a job at Exxon as an engineer and thus Jeff continued his education here at the River Oaks Elementary School.
The mechanical aptitudes of early age continued into interests toward science and technology so Jeff attended the Miami Palmetto Senior High School once the family moved to Miami, Florida and after school he went to the Student Science Training Program of the University of Florida, being awarded the Silver Knight in 1982. The early passion for electrical things and for computers started in Miami and while in school he began his first business in the shape of the Dream Institute which was an educational summer camp for the fourth to sixth grades. Acing his studies he was the valedictorian at his high school and a National Merit Scholar, paving his way into Princeton University.
He began to study physics but he changed to computers, graduating summa cum laude and receiving a Bachelor of Science in Engineering, specializing in electrical engineering and computer science. He joined the Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi societies and was the president of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space at Princeton.
Once he graduated he began to work on Wall Street in the field of computer science and after a while he worked on building a network of international trade for the Fitel Company, an experience that will definitely be helpful later on. By the year 1990 he became the youngest senior vice president at the D.E. Shaw investment firm starting here as improving the Internet-based business opportunities of the firm.
After four years in the D.E. Shaw Company he quit the profitable career to start his own company in 1994, founding Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore. He passed the entire country to go from New York to Seattle and the road gave him sufficient time to think about the business plan, starting the whole project from his garage. At this exact time the US Supreme Court ruled that mail order catalogs didn’t require sales taxes in the states where they don’t have any physical presence and this was a really good thing for the newly founded company.
Software was developing in the garage with a few employees and after a while managed to expand into a larger two-bedroom house with three Sun Microstations. Bezos invited 300 friends for a beta test of the site and it officially opened on July the 16th 1995. From there on no other promotion was needed, the company rising each day and selling books across the entire country and in 45 foreign countries in the first month. The second month led the sales to reach $20,000 per week and by 1997 it went public.
The analysts had doubts about the stability of the company once the traditional retailers began to go online but the initiative and insight of Bezos kept Amazon in the top and led it to become the leader in e-commerce. After books CDs and videos began to be sold in 1998 and then even toys, clothes or electronic devices making the sales reach over 17 billion dollars in 2011 raising the shares of Amazon in a single year to over 70% and adding $6.5 billion to the net worth of Bezos, putting him at number 15 in the Forbes top of billionaires with a current total worth of 34.2 billion dollars.
After the increasing success of Amazon they released the Kindle digital book reader in 2007 and announced the investment in Blue Origin aerospace company that wants to offer space travel to customers. The company was founded by Bezos in 2000 with the dream of one day developing “space hotels, amusement parks, colonies and small cities for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth”, but he kept the company a secret until he purchased the launch and test facilities. Bezos exchanged ideas on the subject in 2013 with Richard Branson, the Chairman of Virgin Galactic, who is also a space flight enthusiast and there were rumors about the two of them collaborating, but nothing is yet certain.
The novelist MacKenzie S. Tuttle was working for Jeff Bezos at D.E. Shaw in 1992 and a year later they got married and have four children, one of which is an adopted daughter along with three sons. They made the news in July 2012 when they donated 2.5 million dollars to pass a referendum in Washington involving the issue of same-sex marriage.
In 2013 Jeff purchased The Washington Post newspaper for the sum of 250 million dollars and this led to changes such as the lifting of the online paywall for several local newspapers. He stated that “The values of The Post do not need changing. […] Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there”.
In December 2013 Bezos announced the Amazon Prime Air experiment that used drones to provide delivery services to customers. In 2014 the first Amazon smartphone was announced but it didn’t prove to be a success and brought the company back a bit, but the beginning of this year made it all back with the first Golden Globes for the television series Transparent and the aim of joining the movie business.
Jeff Bezos was awarded many times during his career for his achievements, so Time magazine named him the Person of the Year in 1999 and US News considers him one of the best leaders in America. He received a honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from the Carnegie Mellon University and The Economist gave him and Gregg Zehr the Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle.
