Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who is best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon, the world's largest online shopping retailer. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in Houston, Texas.
2. His/her Entrepreneurial Journey
Early Life
Jeffrey Preston “Jeff” Bezos” was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His
biological father, Ted Jorgenson, was one of Albuquerque’s top unicyclists and part of a local
troupe the Unicycle Wranglers who put on performance at county fairs and circuses while Jeff was
still a baby. Jeff’s mother, Jacklyn Bezos, was still in her teens when she married Ted, and their
marriage lasted for little more than one year.
“The reality, as far as I’m concerned, is that my Dad is my natural father. The only time I ever
think about it, genuinely, is when a doctor asks me to fill out a form,” Jeff told Wired in 1999.
Jeff’s stepfather, Mike Bezos, was born in Cuba. He escaped to the United States alone at the age
of 15 and worked at the University of Albuquerque. When he married Jeff’s mother, the family
moved to Houston, Texas where Mike became an engineer for Exxon – American, an oil and gas
company that flourished from the mid-1940s to the 1970s.
Jeff displayed remarkable mechanical talent from an early age, which fits well with his varied
scientific interests. Jeff’s ancestors on the mother’s side were early settlers in Texas and the family
owned a large ranch at Cotulla that had been passed on to them over the generations.
3. Education
Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. He
would spend summers at the ranch working on enormously varied tasks such as laying pipe, fixing
windmills, vaccinating cattle, and other farm work. His grandfather, Lawrence Gise, was a huge
role model in his life, with this wide-ranging knowledge of science and constant presence on the
ranch. In a 2010 commencement speech, Jeff told graduates that his grandfather taught him how
“it’s harder to be kind than clever”
Bezos started his first business at school. It was called The Dream Institute, and it was an
educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. The family eventually moved to
Florida and Jeff was transferred to Miami Palmetto Senior High School where he excelled at his
studies and realized his love for computers. He was even invited to participate in the Student
Science Training Program at the University of Florida, where he won a Silver Knight Award in
1982 and was a National Merit Scholar. Bezos graduated as the school’s valedictorian, and a
National Merit Scholar, securing his spot at Princeton University.
Bezos planned to study physics at Princeton University, but he soon decided to return to his love
of computers. He graduated with two Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and
electrical engineering from Princeton University.
Jeff Bezos obtained B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.
4. Early Career
After graduating, Bezos went to Wall Street where computer science was increasingly in demand
and worked in several firms. The job at Fitel (a startup aiming to build a network to conduct
international trade) had him flying every week between New York and London. Bezos stayed in
the finance realm with Bankers Trust, where he rose to vice president, and later the investment
firm D.E. Shaw. The company specialized in the application of computer sciences to the stock
market, and Bezos was hired for his overall talent in the field. At D.E. Shaw, Jeff met his wife
MacKenzie, who was also a Princeton graduate. Jeff married MacKenzie Bezos in 1993. Bezos
rose quickly through the ranks, and in 1990 became the youngest senior vice president in the
company’s history.
It was at D.E. Shaw where Jeff Bezos first came across a digit that would change his life and the
course of internet history. While surfing the web in search of new ventures for D.E. Shaw, Bezos
found a statistic that World Wide Web was growing by 2,300 percent a month. Bezos immediately
understood the potential prospects of selling products online. Shaw tried his best to convince Bezos
to stay in his firm on a long walk in Central Park, but Jeff decided that he would rather try and fail
than never try at all.
Amazon.com
Bezos quit D.E. Shaw in 1994 and moved to Seattle to tap into the potentials of the internet market
by opening an online bookstore. He made the decision by drawing up a list of possible products
that he could sell via the Internet, including CDs, software, and hardware. In the end, books were
the obvious choice because of the wide range of titles in existence. Another advantage of an
internet store was a then-recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mail-order catalogs did not have
to pay taxes in states where they did not have a physical presence. In other words – Bezos paid
zero tax for the products he sold via the internet.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery. – Jeff Bezos
5. Bezos decided that Seattle would be a perfect place for his new business at the time because of the
tremendous pool of hi-tech talent. While his wife MacKenzie drove them from Texas, he spent the
time laying out a business plan on his laptop and calling up possible investors. Jeff Bezos managed
to raise $1 million from his family and friends, enough to set up his business in the garage of his
Seattle home.
Bezos initially incorporated the company as “Cadabra” on July 5, 1994. However, a year later he
considered to change it when his lawyer misheard the word as “cadaver,” but that was not the
worst one. Another alternative was “MakeItSo.com” – a catchphrase from Captain Picard in Jeff’s
beloved Star Trek. It could have also been “aard.com,” which would help push the company to the
front of website listings. Jeff and MacKenzie also registered the domain names Awake.com,
Browse.com, Bookmall.com, and Relentless.com (the latter one still redirects to Amazon.com).
Eventually, Bezos decided on Amazon.com after looking through the words that start with A in
the dictionary. Bezos liked the resonance between one of the planet’s longest rivers and largest
bookstore.
Jeff and MacKenzie set everything up in their two-bedroom house, with extension cords running
down to the garage, and three Sun micro stations on tables that Jeff made from $60 doors.
Ironically, staff meetings would take place at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore. When
everything was ready, Jeff and MacKenzie hurled up 300 people to try the test site when it was up
and running, and the code worked seamlessly on different computer platforms. After opening the
website on July 16, 1995, they told their 300 beta users to spread the word around and set up a bell
to ring every time Amazon made a sale. The Bell did not stay there for long as Amazon abruptly
exploded selling books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries within a month. By September
1995, the sales had summed up to $20,000 a week.
6. Amazon’s first office building. Jeff and his wife MacKenzie set up their first office in their two-bedroom house.
Bezos was determined on taking the company public with an IPO and began recruiting large
amounts of people. These included a few DESCO employees, executives from competing
company Barnes & Noble, software company Symantec, and two people from Microsoft – vice
president of engineering Joel Spiegel, and David Risher, who would later become head of retail.
With a team of extraordinary people in his senior leadership ranks (who would formally become
known as the J-Team) Bezos was convinced that “If we get this right, we might be a $1 billion
company by 2000.”
Going public would not only solidify customer trust but would also outcompete other bookstores
who would soon begin setting up websites of their own, Bezos thought. Barnes & Noble were the
biggest competition. They possess the legacy of establishing ‘the book superstore,’ taking little
independent bookstores out of business between 1991 and 1997, and revolutionizing bookselling.
In 1996, their sales estimated to $2 billion while Amazon was lagging behind with $16 million
that same year.
On May 12, 1997, three days before the IPO, Barnes & Noble filed the lawsuit against Amazon in
federal court for falsely claiming to be “Earth’s Largest Bookstore.” It happened during the seven-
week SEC-mandated “quiet period” meaning that Bezos could not talk to the press before the IPO.
Ironically, the lawsuit only gave Amazon more attention. The two companies competed fiercely
for around a year after Amazon finally went public. Barnes & Noble boasted a broader catalog
while Amazon tried to track down books from independent dealers and antique shops. Barnes &
Noble got a $200 million investment from German media giant Bertelsmann and also took the
company public. Bezos then swiftly expanded Amazon’s product line, and changed “Earth’s
7. Biggest Bookstore” to “Books, Music and More” – leaving Barnes & Noble, as one writer put it,
“wrapping its arms around the neck of a phantom.”
The stock traded below its IPO price at first and Bezos worried that the company might lose a
significant portion of its investment. On May 15, 1997, the stock price was set for a $12-to-$14
range on NASDAQ (AMZN) on the IPO day. Then it increased from $14 to $16 before the
Amazon’s investment bankers settled on the $18 price. Amazon.com raised $54 million in its IPO
and the online bookstore market value reached $438 million. Amazon put 3 million shares on the
block. It was a blockbuster year for Amazon as they experienced a 900 percent growth in annual
revenue. Bezos’s family had each invested $10 thousand dollars from the start as a backup plan –
it was a major part of their life savings. As six percent owners of Amazon, they officially became
multimillionaires by the end of the decade, and Jeff was named Time’s Person of the Year in 1999.
The Time magazine featured Jeff Bezos as Time’s Person of the Year in 1999.
Amazon & eBay
Starting out as a Silicon Valley startup called AuctionWeb on September 03, 1995, eBay proved
to be a worrisome rival for the reason that it was growing rapidly, and unlike Amazon, it was
profitable. The company made $5.7 million in 1997, $47.4 million in 1998, rising to a staggering
$224.7 million in 1999. The business model was perfect: eBay took a small commission on each
8. sale, but since the sellers were actual people auctioning their products to the highest bidder – there
was no need for storing inventories, mailing packages, and warehouses. The website started off
with collectibles and baseball cards, but it was well on its way to becoming the ‘unlimited
selection’ store that Bezos always wanted.
Bezos invited eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and CEO Meg Whitman to Seattle in the summer of
1998, when eBay had just filed to go public (IPO). The two teams of executives, who would run
into each other often in the next ten years, discussed various ways of working together. Omidyar
and Whitman suggested creating links, so that for example if the product could not be found on
eBay.com, the customer would be linked to Amazon.com and vice-versa. Bezos suggested the
possibility of making a significant investment, which put off the two executives who left thinking
that Bezos was offering to buy eBay Inc. for around $600 million. Although no formal propositions
were made, the number was roughly the market capitalization that eBay was pursuing in its IPO.
The executives of eBay were extremely ambitious – just like Bezos at the start – thought they were
pioneering a new type of virtual commerce, and it was pointless to convince them otherwise. They
were also put off by Bezos’s famous distinctive laugh.
After failing to find a middle ground with the executives, Bezos had attempted to secretly start up
his own auction project. The project was stationed on the second floor of Columbia Center and
was called EBS, for “Earth’s Biggest Selection” (or as employees joked, eBay by spring). Amazon
Auctions launched in March 1999 to a slow start. Bezos started putting lots of energy and money
into the project, which included buying a company to broadcast auctions live on the Web and
signing with Sotheby’s Auction House to focus on high-end products. The whole effort was
meaningless. Customers, who were accustomed to traditional shopping and predictable prices,
would find Amazon Auctions through a link on the Amazon main site – and ended up in a dingy
second-hand leftovers market.
Amazon’s Rapid Expansion
The nineties were intense days at the company, but as Jeff Blackburn, responsible for product
development and operations at Amazon, recalls that they were the most fun and challenging.
Bezos’s ‘uplifting’ defeat was linked to the network effect – where goods or services become
increasingly valuable as more people use them. The Internet was still fresh in the 1990s, and
9. companies were still getting a grasp of how all these things work. Bezos saw the defeat as a crucial
step along the way, and first in the series of critical experiments that would expand Amazon to
third-party sellers. The zShops platform that had evolved from Auctions also failed to gain any
momentum, and the company accepted that the Web’s small traders were inseparable from eBay
due to the network effect. The most prominent user of these auction projects was, in fact, Bezos
himself. This one time, he purchased a complete skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear for $40,000 and
displayed it in the lobby of Amazon’s then-new headquarters at the Pacific Medical Center
building with a sign that reads “PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR.”
Amazon added clothing sales to the product line in October 2002, after partnering up with hundreds
of retailers including Land’s End, Nordstrom, and The Gap. They also organized a subsidiary
entitled Amazon Services which allowed customers to order goods from co-branded sites such as
Borders and Toys ‘R Us. In 2003, Amazon launched A9 – a commercial search engine focusing
on e-commerce sites. Around the same time, they opened an online sporting goods store, offering
around 3,000 different brands. Amazon’s rapid expansion allowed Bezos to continue
experimenting with new product lines and services. Some of them, like Amazon’s attempt at
selling jewelry, didn’t work out. While others, like Amazon Prime, which offered a free two-day
shipping within the United States for an annual fee of $79, proved to be a significant success. In
fact, Prime’s success led to Amazon’s launch in Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Canada, and
Japan over the next decade. In addition to securing the customers’ loyalty, Amazon Prime service
further distanced Amazon from its competitors.
Amazon took another leap towards innovation in technology development by introducing a series
of e-readers The Amazon Kindle in 2007. Flipping back to the first page from which the company
started, Bezos sought to alter the way people acquire books, and the Kindle series was
revolutionary in its purpose. The Kindle is considered primarily responsible for the establishment
of the electronic book market internationally. This lightweight reading device helped Amazon
secure 95 percent of the U.S. market for books until Apple challenged The Kindle’s supremacy
with the introduction of the iPad in 2010. In response, Bezos cut down the Kindle’s retail price
and added new features.
10. The first generation Kindle (2007).
In 2011, Amazon decided to give Apple a run for its money with the introduction of the KindleFire
– a tablet computer aimed at directly competing with the iPad. “We haven’t built the best tablet at
a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,” Bezos boasted to ABC News. The
KindleFire also introduced a ‘Whispersync’ feature allowing users with various devices to mark
where they stopped in the book and continue reading at the same place on another device – further
altering the way we read.
It is remarkable to consider that Amazon’s sales revenue grew up by 122.56% from $48.08 billion
(2011) to $107.01 billion (2015), but the net income growth remains volatile. For example,
Amazon’s net income growth was negative and dropped by $241 million in 2014. However, in
2015, Amazon’s net income growth was positive and reached $596 million. But against the
backdrop of rapidly growing sales revenue the net income growth appears negligible. Bezos has
poured most of Amazon’s revenue into marketing and promotion and hopes to be the No. 1 player
in the business. The Amazon’s price per share grew up from $18.00 (May 15, 1997) to $549.42
(February 25, 2016).
In 2006, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon Web Services that includes a broad set of global compute,
storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services. Now they boast a mass of
various subsidiaries, including a2z, A9.com, Amazon Web Services, Alexa Internet, Audible.com,
comiXology, Digital Photography Review, Goodreads, Internet Movie Database, Junglee.com,
11. Twitch, Zappos (the full list of Amazon’s properties is available at Quora), which allows business
clients to employ Amazon’s online infrastructure technology.
Blue Origin
Pioneering e-commerce, reinventing book trade, and becoming one of the most prominent figures
of the internet was only a portion of Bezos’s goals. His long-term plans have always been grand,
and seemingly out of reach – and the success of Amazon served as a gateway for Jeff to finally
realize his wild ambitions. Bezos’s mother keeps a copy of a speech he made while back in school
where he declares his goal of establishing a fleet of habitable orbiting space stations, turning Earth
into one big nature reserve. This ambition of his was not left abandoned.
In 2004, Bezos founded an aerospace company named Blue Origin, aimed at developing new
technology for spaceflight, with the ultimate goal of establishing “an enduring human presence in
outer space.” The company owns a 26-acre research campus just outside Seattle, and a private
rocket launching facility in West Texas. OnNovember 24, 2015, Blue Origin made headlines when
they successfully managed to send a rocket to suborbital space and land it safely onto a landing
pad after takeoff while they were testing their New Shepard space vehicle.
New Shepard is a multi-passenger rocket-propelled vehicle designed to establish travel to
suborbital space at competitive prices. The rocket landing has been deemed ‘historic’ as no other
space company has managed to pull off such a feat. The success of this mission means a significant
decrease in the cost of spaceflight and a step closer to establishing an opportunity for the general
public to engage in space travel.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard rocket booster successfully lands in West Texas on November 24, 2015.
12. The Washington Post
On August 05, 2013, Bezos was on the news for having entirely purchased The Washington Post
for $250 million in cash. “The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership,”
company’s chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham says, “but we wanted to do more than
survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”
Bezos reaffirmed that he did not seek to alter the values of The Washington Post, but merely to fix
its focus on the public. “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.” The Graham family – descendants of Eugene Meyer,
who acquired The Post in 1933 – had owned it for four generations. Bezos announced that he was
meaning to maintain the existing management, expressing respect and admiration for the Graham
family.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post fromthe Graham family for $250 million in cash.
Amazon Prime & Amazon Studios
In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative
by Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones—remote-controlled machines that can
perform an array of human tasks—to provide delivery services to customers. According to Bezos,
these drones are able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and are capable of traveling within
a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center. He also stated that Prime Air could become
a reality within as little as four or five years.
13. Bezos oversaw one of Amazon's few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone
in 2014; criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year. However,
Bezos did score a victory with the development of original content through Amazon Studios. After
premiering several new programs in 2013, Amazon hit it big in 2014 with the critically
acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle. In 2015, the company produced and released
Spike Lee's Chi-Raq as its first original feature film.
In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek
Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits
on IMDb. In July 2017, Bezos briefly surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the
richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg, before dropping back to No. 2. The Amazon
chief then reclaimed the top spot in October, and in January 2018, Bloomberg pegged his net worth
at $105.1 billion, making Bezos the richest person in history.
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," said Bezos. "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. "Not long
afterward, The Seattle Times reported that more changes were afoot for Amazon, with the
company consolidating its consumer retail operations in order to focus on Alexa, AWS, digital
entertainment and other growing areas. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the news, saying,
"As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the
company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others."
14. CHALLENGES FACED BY HIM
Yet during Amazon’s early years, Bezos made more mistakes than many of us make in a lifetime.
At a minimum made more expensive mistakes than any of the rest of us, adding up to hundreds of
millions of dollars in what he has characterized as “bad choices.”
1. In 1998 the fledgling Amazon.com sold books, music, and movies, and quickly became an
online leader in those categories. The company attracted significant venture capital, and
Bezos had dreams of turning Amazon into the “everything store.” After considerable
market research, he decided to branch into the toy market. But toys were very different
from Amazon’s previous offerings because there were no major distributors. Amazon had
to actually buy the toys from various manufacturers, store them in inventory, and then hope
they sold. This went against Amazon’s core business model but Bezos could not be
dissuaded. Bezos insisted on spending $120 million to buy toys, against the advice of every
other Amazon executive, even the head of the toy department. Bezos wouldn’t budge,
remarking “If I have to, I will drive to the landfill myself.” That comment proved to be
prescient. After Christmas there were $50 million in toys leftover, and with nowhere to
keep them, and no guarantee there would ever be a market for them, the easiest option was
to dump the toys. Amazon ended up giving toys to various children’s charities and selling
the rest to exporters for a fraction of the value.
2. In the same year, Bezos also started Amazon Auctions, which he felt could overtake eBay.
He called the project EBS for “Earth’s Biggest Selection,” but those in the know called it
“eBay by Spring.” He spent $175 million acquiring the payment company Accept.com to
facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers. But it was a bigger failure than toys for
Amazon. eBay was just too well known; it enjoyed first mover advantage and a sizeable
network effect. There was no room for another auction site, especially not one with fewer
buyers, fewer sellers, fewer items for sale, and no competitive advantages.
3. Another 1998 purchase was Junglee, a search site that compared prices of products across
the web. Comparison shopping was hot and so was search, with companies like Google,
Yahoo, PriceGrabber, and Bizrate all commanding huge valuations. Bezos spent $170
15. million on it, but the Amazon board of directors hated it because it sent customers away
from Amazon to other sites. It was disbanded in a matter of months.
4. Not only did Bezos dream of Amazon selling everything in the world, but he also wanted
to own businesses across the web. Bezos went on a huge shopping spree in 1998 and 1999,
buying companies including movie site IMDB.com, a social networking company
PlanetAll.com, a data company Alexa.com, a British bookstore, and a German bookstore.
He also invested heavily in Drugstore.com, Pets.com, Gear.com, WineShopper.com,
Greenlight.com, and HomeGrocery.com. But according to The Everything Store, “almost
all of them went down in flames.” Bezos and his team simply did not have the capacity to
work with all of those different companies.
5. Books, movies, and music had worked. But by the turn of the century, almost every other
effort Amazon had made to grow failed. However, these failures weren’t in vain. To the
contrary, looking back at a letter Bezos wrote to shareholders in 1998, it seems that these
mistakes were part of a grander plan: “We will make bold rather than timid investment
decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages.
Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another
valuable lesson in either case.”
6. Bezos made an embarrassing number of bad investments, which is true of all investors. But
look at some of his other investments and you quickly see a very different story: Google,
AirBNB, and Uber are all part of Bezos’ personal portfolio. It is fair to say that over time,
Bezos’ wins have more than made up for his losses. As for the companies Amazon has
acquired, some failed but many more have been huge successes, like Zappos, ShopBop,
and Diapers.com.
Bezos had close to a billion dollars in failures, painful learning experiences that required reflection,
but he recovered. His mistakes came mainly when he steered away from the main path Amazon
was paving. Bezos learned his lessons, adapted, and significantly changed course by 2000. In lieu
of unadulterated growth, he looked inward and focused on the company’s basic principles and
tenets of success. He paused acquisitions and focused on strengthening Amazon’s core business
and increasing customer satisfaction. He learned from the toys mistake and partnered with Toys
16. “R” Us to sell their products online without having to buy inventory. He did the same with
electronics, partnering with Circuit City rather than going it alone and taking inventory risk.
Bezos’ failures are important for two reasons. First, Bezos—like most successful entrepreneurs—
knows the value of failure and embraces it as part of his company’s core strategy. He was not naive
enough to believe that all his investments would pay off, nor was he ignorant enough to assume
his company could thrive without making these investments. He had to take calculated risk, even
at the risk of embarrassment. Second, and more importantly, Bezos was able to learn from these
mistakes. The truth is that most of his failures came as a result of deviating from his pattern of
success: rather than focus on acquiring and investing in companies that thought and acted like
Amazon, Bezos diversified into areas against that philosophy. That idea failed, but Bezos learned
and ultimately succeeded by realigning Amazon in the 21st century.
Personality Traits & Leadership Qualities
Bezos is known for his double-personality that turns him from a kind person into a rough executive
inducing fear and respect in his employees. A hyper-intelligent, ultra-driven individual, he expects
everyone around him to behave likewise. Amazon staff are said to be living in fear of his abrasive
flare-ups, including “Why are you wasting my life?” and “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”
Jeff Bezos seems to have no problem running the company while still personally reading feedback
from customers. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes.
It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of
information,” senior Amazon vice president Jeff Wilke explains. When there is a real issue, the
consequences can be harsh on the employees responsible for the issue.
Bezos always moves faster, makes his employees work harder, and pursues both significant
innovations and small ones. The superb image for Amazon is not just the everything store, but
ultimately the everything company. The future has many things in store for Amazon. They still
haven’t achieved next-day or even same-day delivery for Prime members and they are still set to
17. expand their grocery service Amazon Fresh beyond Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Jeff
Bezos expects Amazon’s mass expansion to as many of countries as possible.
It is unknown whether Jeff Bezos’s wild ideas and an active imagination are rooted in his early
love for science fiction or it is just his personality trait. Bezos is known for thinking outside the
box, re-shaping the box, or tossing it in the trash altogether. From revolutionizing the way, we buy
and read books, to creating a private spaceflight company aimed for the people, to launching a
plan for the use of drones in package delivery, Bezos always challenges the norm. He believes that
breaking away from the pack and making these extraordinary decisions is what truly leads to
innovation. It is the sole element that all successful leaders seem to possess. Jeff Bezos will only
get bigger, and his innovations wilder until either he decides to stop, or there is no one left to stop
him.
Jeff and his wife MacKenzie Bezos have four children, three sons and one daughter adopted from
China.
Jeff and his wife MacKenzie Bezos at the annual conference at the Sun Valley, Idaho Resort, July 12, 2013.
Jeff Bezos life story shows that he achieved all his success thanks to his strong desire to learn new
technologies, hard work and, of course, thanks to his disctintive leadership qualities. We hope you
have enjoyed exploring Jeff Bezos biography and success story of Amazon and Blue Origin and it
has inspired you to new discoveries.
18. Success of his venture in detail
Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $58.8 billion in November of 2015, according to Forbes. Because
his fortune is mostly the result of Amazon.com, which he founded and led, Bezos scores an 8 out
of ten on the magazine’s self-made score.
Bezos’ fortune puts him among the richest men in the world, and he is accelerating toward the top
of that list. In July, Amazon’s profits exceeded expectations, netting $92 million in the second
quarter. For a company that has typically eschewed profits in favor of reinvesting in the business,
the huge profit made news and drove up the stock price considerably.
After the news, Bezos’ 18% stake in Amazon propelled him to the rank of fifth-richest man in the
world, according to Forbes. But according to a report by competing wealth tracker Bloomberg,
Bezos is doing even better. It reported that, thanks to Amazon’s stellar performance in 2015, he
had surpassed Mexican magnate Carlos Slim to become the world’s fourth-richest person.
Bloomberg reports that Bezos’ fortune more than doubled in 2015, adding $29.6 billion. That
growth is largely a result of investors flocking to Amazon in recognition of not just its leadership
position in retail, but also the potential of new business lines, such as cloud storage.
While the bulk of Bezos’ fortune is attributable to Amazon, he is also an investor in a number of
younger tech companies that are making headlines. He has been listed as an investor in home-
sharing company Airbnb; software company Basecamp; publisher Business Insider; education tech
company General Assembly; 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot Industries; taxi dispatcher Uber;
and healthcare scheduler Zocdoc, among many, many others.
In 1998, Bezos also became an early investor in fellow, and sometimes rival, tech giant Google.
The $250,000 he invested at the time was worth $280 million by the time the Google went public
in 2004, though it is unclear whether or not he has held onto his stake.
19. Among other properties, Bezos owns a $24.25 million Beverly Hills estate with a pool and a tennis
court. He also owns a $28 million lakefront home in Medina, Washington, the same town in which
Bill Gates lives. The home, made up of two buildings, encompasses 29,000 feet.
With his fortune, Bezos has also invested in and supported projects and causes that interest him.
One such project is The Clock Of The Long Now, a clock inside of a mountain that is designed to
keep accurate time for 10,000 years. He donated $42 million and a parcel of land he owns in Texas
for the building of the clock, which its makers hope will run well into the lives of the next
civilization.
One project that made slightly more headlines was Bezos’ 2013 purchase of The Washington Post
for $250 million. The deal made headlines and raised eyebrows. Bezos later called the Post a
national institution, which he hoped to keep alive in the Internet age with his tech expertise and
deep pockets.
Some have criticized Bezos as being similar to Steve Jobs, who was skeptical of philanthropy, and
didn’t make many headlines with his charitable donations.
But he has made charitable and political donations over the years. In 2012, Bezos and his wife
contributed $2.5 million to support a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington state. He also
donated $10 million to build the Bezos Center for Innovation at the Seattle Museum of History
and Industry, and $15 million to create the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton
Neuroscience Institute.
20. In addition, he and his wife have created the Bezos Family Foundation, an educational charity.
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