jeff bezos biography article

American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.

Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Quick facts, early life and education, career in finance, amazon: start and success through the years, blue origin, owner of the washington post, healthcare venture, philanthropy: bezos day one fund and earth fund, personal life: ex-wife, fiancée, and kids.

1964-present

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and executive chair of the e-commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post , and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the internet’s biggest success stories. He started Blue Origin in 2000, then in 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world; his estimated net worth is $137.9 billion as of May 2023.

FULL NAME: Jeffrey Preston Bezos BORN: January 12, 1964 BIRTHPLACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico SPOUSE: MacKenzie Scott (1993-2019) CHILDREN: 3 sons and 1 daughter ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, known as Jeff Bezos, was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensens were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child. He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

After high school, Bezos attended Princeton University. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos became D.E. Shaw’s youngest vice president.

While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. 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, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his site. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage; they eventually expanded operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstations.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup team had envisioned.

Amazon went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys, and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early ’90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

As part of Bezos’ 2018 annual shareholder letter, the media tycoon said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. By September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company to ever hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.

At the end of 2018, Amazon announced it was raising the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has still been criticized for its working conditions and grueling pace, with workers protesting during Prime Day in July 2019.

Amazon Instant Video & Amazon Studios

In 2006, Amazon launched its video-on-demand service. Initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video.

Bezos premiered several original programs with the launch of Amazon Studios in 2013. The company hit it big in 2014 with the critically-acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle . The company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee ’s Chi-Raq , in 2015.

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 early 2018, The Seattle Times reported that Amazon had consolidated its consumer retail operations in order to focus on growing areas including digital entertainment and Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant.

Kindle E-Reader

Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read, and store their book selections, in 2007.

Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company’s next-generation tablet designed to give Apple’s iPad a run for its money. “We haven’t built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,” Bezos said, according to ABC News .

Amazon Drones

In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called Amazon Prime Air, using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said these drones would be able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and be capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company’s distribution centers.

The first Prime Air delivery took place in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016.

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.

Acquiring Whole Foods

Bezos had been eyeing the food delivery market, and in 2017, Amazon announced it had acquired the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion in cash.

The company began offering in-store deals to Amazon Prime customers and grocery delivery in as little as two hours, depending on the market. As a result, Walmart and Kroger also began offering meal delivery to its customers.

Stepping Down as Amazon CEO

In February 2021, Amazon announced that Bezos would step down as CEO in the third quarter of the year. In fact, he transitioned to executive chair of Amazon’s board slightly ahead of schedule in July. Longtime Amazon employee Andy Jassy replaced Bezos as CEO.

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes. “We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen,” Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company’s chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham .

“ The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. “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.”

In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote:

“The values of The Post do not need changing... There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper’s technology staff (hundreds of those employees published an open letter to their boss asking for salary increases and better benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted several scoops, including revealing that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russians, leading to his resignation.

By 2016, the organization said it was profitable. The following year, the Post had an ad revenue of more than $100 million, with three straight years of double-digit revenue growth. Amazon soon bypassed The New York Times digital in unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019, according to ComScore.

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,” Bezos said. “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.”

As one of the world’s wealthiest people, Bezos had been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of philanthropic efforts. But in recent years, he has made major philanthropic donations through two new initiatives.

In 2018, Bezos and then-wife MacKenzie Scott launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on “funding existing nonprofits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities.” The announcement came a year after Bezos had asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune. Bezos gave away $2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit.

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

Bezos met MacKenzie Scott (then MacKenzie Tuttle) when they both worked at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills to fund her writing career. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married shortly thereafter in 1993. Bezos and Scott have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

Scott was an integral part of the founding and success of Amazon, helping create Amazon’s first business plan and serving as the company’s first accountant. Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband. A novelist by trade, training under Toni Morrison during her college years at Princeton University, Scott published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright , in 2005, and her second novel, Traps , in 2013.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Bezos and Scott divorced in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Bezos’ stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his stake at nearly $110 billion and Scott’s at more than $37 billion. Scott announced that she planned to give away at least half of her wealth to charity.

Right after Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie in January 2019, The National Enquirer published an 11-page exposé of the business mogul’s extramarital affair with television host Lauren Sanchez. Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into the motives of The National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. The following month, in a lengthy post on Medium, Bezos accused AMI of threatening to publish explicit photos unless he backed off the investigation.

“Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” Bezos wrote. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

In that same post, Bezos suggested that there was possibly a link between AMI’s actions and the Saudi Arabian government. Later, a forensic analysis of Bezos’ phone revealed that it was hacked after he received a video via WhatsApp from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman .

Sanchez divorced her husband in April 2019. She and Bezos made their first public appearance as a couple that July at Wimbledon. In late May 2023, Page Six first reported that Bezos and Sanchez are engaged.

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Who is Jeff Bezos?

How did jeff bezos start amazon, where was jeff bezos born, was jeff bezos born rich, what was jeff bezos’s first job.

Jeff Bezos (born January 12, 1964, Albuquerque , New Mexico , U.S.) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc. , an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

While still in high school , Bezos developed the Dream Institute, a centre that promoted creative thinking in young students. After graduating (1986) summa cum laude from Princeton University with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science , he undertook a series of jobs before joining the New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1990. Soon named senior vice president—the firm’s youngest—Bezos was in charge of examining the investment possibilities of the Internet. Its enormous potential—Web usage was growing by more than 2,000 percent a year—sparked his entrepreneurial imagination. In 1994 he quit D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle , Washington, to open a virtual bookstore. Working out of his garage with a handful of employees, Bezos began developing the software for the site. Named after the South American river, Amazon sold its first book in July 1995.

Amazon quickly became the leader in e-commerce. Open 24 hours a day, the site was user-friendly, encouraging browsers to post their own reviews of books and offering discounts, personalized recommendations, and searches for out-of-print books. In June 1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos. In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores. The success of Amazon encouraged other retailers, including major book chains, to establish online stores.

As more companies battled for Internet dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of products, including consumer electronics, apparel, and hardware. Amazon diversified even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing service that eventually became the largest such service in the world. In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle , a digital book reader with wireless Internet connectivity, enabling customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand. Amazon announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books had surpassed those of hardcover books. That same year Amazon moved into making its own television shows and movies with its Amazon Studios division. Amazon’s yearly net sales increased from $510,000 in 1995 to some $600 million in 1998 and from more than $19.1 billion in 2008 to almost $233 billion in 2018. About half of the company’s operating income in 2018 was derived from AWS. Two years later Amazon registered record profits, and its revenue in the fourth quarter that year surpassed $100 billion for the first time. The unprecedented numbers were, in part, caused by a rise in home shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In February 2021 Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as CEO later that year. However, he planned to remain at Amazon as executive chairman.

Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin , in 2000. Blue Origin bought a launch site in Texas soon thereafter and planned to introduce a crewed suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard , in 2018 and an orbital launch vehicle , New Glenn, in 2020. Bezos bought The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million in 2013. Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018 at $112 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

In 1993 Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle, whom he had met at D.E. Shaw. The couple announced in January 2019 that they were divorcing, and the following day the National Enquirer printed a story revealing that Bezos was having an affair with another woman. Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into how the tabloid had obtained his private text messages. Then, in February, he posted a lengthy essay online in which he accused officials at American Media Inc. (AMI), the parent company of the Enquirer , of “extortion and bribery” for suggesting that they would release nude photographs of Bezos if he did not stop his inquiry, amid other demands. The Bezos-led investigation later alleged that his lover’s brother had leaked the texts.

Real Time Net Worth

• Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 out of his Seattle garage.
• Bezos stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in 2021. He owns a bit less than 10% of the company.
• He and his wife MacKenzie divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage and he transferred a quarter of his then-16% Amazon stake to her.
• In 2020, Bezos committed to donate $10 billion to climate causes by 2030 through his Bezos Earth Fund; he has granted $2 billion so far.
• He owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets; he briefly flew to space in one in July 2021.
• Bezos said in a November 2022 interview with CNN that he plans to give away the majority of his wealth in his lifetime, without disclosing specific details.

Forbes Lists

I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. Jeff Bezos

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How Bezos and Amazon changed the world

Coleman Chair Professor of Marketing and Director of Research, Texas A&M University

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Venkatesh Shankar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Amazon announced Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO almost 27 years after he founded the company to sell books to customers over dial-up modems .

Amazon wasn’t the first bookstore to sell online, but it wanted to be “ Earth’s biggest .” When it first launched, a bell would ring in the company’s Seattle headquarters every time an order was placed . Within weeks, the bell was ringing so frequently employees had to turn it off.

But Bezos – who will remain at the company – set his sights on making it an “everything store.” After achieving dominance in retail, the company would go on to become a sprawling and powerful global conglomerate in numerous lines of business.

Today, Amazon is the third-most valuable U.S. company – behind Apple and Microsoft – with a market capitalization of around US$1.7 trillion , greater than the gross domestic product of all but a dozen or so countries.

Here’s how Bezos reshaped retailing.

Redefining retail

Amazon – named after the world’s largest river – continually took shopping convenience to newer levels.

Before Amazon’s founding on July 5, 1994, shoppers had to travel to stores to discover and buy things. Shopping used to be hard work – wandering down multiple aisles in search of a desired item, dealing with crying and nagging kids, and waiting in long checkout lines. Today, stores try to reach out to shoppers anywhere, anytime and through multiple channels and devices.

After first experiencing two-day free shipping from Amazon’s Prime membership program, shoppers started expecting no less from every online retailer. An estimated 142 million shoppers in the U.S. have Amazon Prime .

The company made shopping more convenient through features like one-click ordering ; personalized recommendations; package pickup at Amazon hubs and lockers ; ordering products with the single touch of a Dash button ; and in-home delivery with Amazon Key .

Shoppers can also search for and order items through a simple voice command to an Echo or by clicking an Instagram or Pinterest image. Amazon even has a cashier-less “Go” store in Seattle.

Amazon has also been a factor in the rising closures of brick-and-mortar stores that can’t keep pace with the changes in retail. Even before the pandemic, stores were closing at a phenomenal rate, with analysts predicting a coming “ retail apocalypse .” Amazon benefited enormously last year as much of the U.S. went into lockdown and more consumers preferred ordering goods online rather than risking their health by going to physical stores.

Amazon’s share price has almost doubled since the lockdown began in March 2020, even as over 11,000 retail stores closed their doors .

A major employer

Amazon’s impact extends to other industries , including smart consumer devices like Alexa, cloud services like Amazon Web Services and technology products like drones.

Such is Amazon’s impact that industry players and observers use the term “Amazoned” to describe their business model and operations being disrupted by Amazon.

Today, Amazon is the second-largest U.S.-based publicly listed employer and the fifth biggest in the world . It employs 1.2 million people, having hired 427,000 during the pandemic . No wonder Amazon created such a buzz in 2018 when it held a competition to select a location for its second headquarters . It eventually picked Arlington, Virginia.

Amazon’s work culture is intense. It has a reputation as a cutthroat environment with a high employee burnout rate . It is automating as many jobs as possible , mostly in warehousing.

At the same time, after criticism from policymakers, Amazon stepped up in 2018 and raised the minimum wage for its U.S. employees to $15 per hour .

Faced with growing criticisms about the mounting impact of Amazon’s boxes and other packaging material on the environment, Amazon has also pledged to disclose more information about its environmental impact .

The next generation

What’s in store for Amazon as Bezos steps down from his CEO role later this year?

Bezos, who will stay on as Amazon’s executive chairman , has previously said his focus is on preventing Amazon from dying . As he noted at a 2018 all-hands meeting, “Amazon is not too big to fail.”

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As a professor of marketing who has conducted research on online retailing and analyzed hundreds of cases, I believe that Amazon’s future – and humanity’s – is inextricably linked to the rise of artificial intelligence. Starting with Alexa, the company’s virtual assistant , Amazon is betting on AI.

In fact, Amazon is testing anticipatory shipping , a practice in which it anticipates what shoppers need and mails the items before shoppers order them. Shoppers can keep the items they like and return those they don’t want at no charge. It is also betting on cashier-free stores and AI-powered home robots .

Amazon’s future success will depend on how the incoming CEO – current head of cloud computing Andy Jassy – navigates these new technologies while pushing the company into more industries, such as health care and financial services .

His challenge is to keep Bezos’ legacy and Amazon’s disruptive culture alive.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 3, 2019.

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Jeff Bezos: Bio: An Eye On The Future

J eff Bezos loves being on the move. He sits in the back of a white van, beaming as usual, surrounded by an entourage of lanky young lieutenants from Amazon.com the Web’s biggest retail store and, someday, if Bezos gets it right, Earth’s Biggest Store. The early-morning landscape of southeast Kansas hustles by: wood-frame houses, trailers, motels with lots of pickup trucks in their parking lots, a Kum & Go convenience store, cow pastures and the dull, forever flatness of the prairie. You’ve heard of places described as cow towns? Coffeyville was actually labeled Cow Town on maps on account of the stockyards here. In the 1860s the name was changed to honor Colonel James A. Coffey, who set up a grand trading post on the frontier, selling stuff to Native Americans.

Today’s frontier is hidden from the physical world, burbling and buzzing along the interconnected wires, routers and computers of the Net. But the possibilities for trade are far more fabulous than could ever have been imagined 100–or even 10–years ago. That’s where Bezos comes in. His van rounds a corner, passes an airfield, heads down a two-lane road and pulls into a long driveway that leads to the biggest warehouse you’ve ever seen. The place is known as the Coffeyville Distribution Center, and Bezos (pronounced Bay-zos), who’s never been here before, is giggling with excitement. He tells the driver to stop so he can snap a picture of a workman pounding a HELP WANTED sign into the turf. Bezos, 35, a meticulous documentarian, is worried that his life is scrolling by too fast to remember, a life that is so fantastic as to verge on the unbelievable. So he takes plenty of pictures and awful, jittery amateur videos. At the very least, they’ll help tell his story to the Bezoses’ first child, a boy due in March.

Here in Coffeyville is another piece of the proof that Bezos’ early and fervent belief in the Internet–that it would rock retailing, that it would change the way we live–stands as one of the more prescient assumptions ever made by a businessperson. “We’re trying to build something lasting,” Bezos says, looking at this 850,000-sq.-ft. monument to free trade. The warehouse is stocked with books, CDs, TVs, stereos, video games, software, toys. And yet only 10% of the area is being used. The rest is stretch space, here for the ongoing e-commerce revolution.

BEZOS’ REVOLUTION

If all goes according to his daring–some might say outlandish–plan, this warehouse will be at capacity within the next few years and will handle everything: washing machines, cars, rubber gaskets, Prozac, exercise machines, marmalade, model airplanes, everything but firearms and certain live animals. You name it, Amazon will sell it. “Anything,” says Bezos, “with a capital A.” And that’s the point: Jeffrey Preston Bezos is trying to assemble nothing less than Earth’s biggest selection of goods, then put them on his website for people to find and buy. Not just physical things that you can touch, but services too, such as banking, insurance, travel.

It’s incredibly risky. How elastic is the Amazon brand name? How much can you stretch it until it simply explodes and becomes meaningless to consumers? And how long can the money hold out? Bezos has already burned through a bank’s worth of cash with no sign of slowing down. If anything, he’s upping the ante–according to estimates, the company’s net loss could be $350 million this year alone.

And the e-commerce world has changed enormously since Seattle-based Amazon jumped out to its “first-mover” advantage. There are plenty of second, third and fourth movers to battle. They come in the form of category killers that overwhelm you with selection, expertise, price and service for a given class of goods. Adornis.com is bauble central for luxury items, for instance, and Petopia.com is one of dozens of sites that will shower you and your doggie with selection. On the other side are e-malls such as Buy.com and Shopnow.com Traditional retailers are making the transition to the Web too, and one of them–Wal-Mart–could be letting a monster loose when its new website debuts early next year. And don’t forget eBay, the other e-commerce revolutionary. eBay’s many-to-many approach to selling–the world is just one big auction–completely opposes Amazon’s one-to-many, fixed-price universe. And it’s been profitable from Day One.

The sheer number of competitive websites alone will put pressure on Amazon’s growth–one reason Bezos is adding categories as fast as he can. During the past year, he’s added video games and DVD movies, toys, electronics, software, home-improvement products, auctions and zShops–an online flea market where anyone can sell anything. Bezos says he wants to double his offerings again next year. The company also has minority stakes in other e-commerce companies such as Drugstore.com Pets.com HomeGrocer.com Gear.com and Della.com a wedding and gift registry.

But how long can you build warehouses to the sky and not fill them? Says Scott Sipprelle, founding partner of the investment firm Midtown Research Group: “The chance of a painful failure goes up as they increase the chips on the table. Just look at the metrics. As the company grows in scale, the absolute dollars it’s losing are greater and greater: debt is going up, margins are going down and cash burn is increasing.”

Bezos, naturally enough, is unmoved by the naysaying because he’s convinced that as more customers come to his site, he’ll be able to offer the lowest prices. And they will come because Amazon simply does the best job of helping them find stuff. But what if they use his site for research, then go elsewhere for the cheapest price? Bezos has considered that as well. And he has a possible solution: “Membership clubs!” he says. “If you want to see all the information we collect on Amazon–the customer reviews, the professional reviews and use our agenting technology–you have to pay $30 a year.” Those membership fees would be used to help drive down the price of items, which would be sold almost at cost. Nonmembers could shop there, of course. They just wouldn’t have access to Amazon’s rich data and whizzy technology.

Most of the market is betting that Bezos wins and that Amazon emerges from what will surely be massive carnage among Internet retailers over the next few years. During the past two weeks, with holiday sales booming, Amazon’s stock price has soared to $94. The stock has split three times. Sales are expected to crest $1 billion this year. “We firmly believe,” says Salomon Smith Barney’s Holly Becker, “that Wall Street will look back on these growing pains and realize management’s foresight in developing one of the smartest strategies in business history.”

Bezos & Co. conceived an entirely new way of thinking about the ancient art of retailing, from creating a “flow experience” that keeps customers coming back to Amazon’s website to read product reviews or one another’s “wish lists,” to automating as much as possible a complex process that starts when you hit the patent-protected “1-Click” buy technology and ends when your purchase is delivered to your door. The Coffeyville center, for instance, is part of a nationwide distribution network specially designed to handle e-commerce. Half a dozen warehouses like it have been strategically placed in low- or no-sales-tax states around the U.S.–3 million sq. ft., at a cost of $200 million–and are built to do what traditional warehouses can’t do: deliver items directly and efficiently to customers rather than by pallet to retail stores. It requires new ways of thinking about employees–and customers too.

You can see it in each of the distribution centers. Here in Coffeyville, the high walls are painted white, and the endless rows of stock shelves shine in fluorescent yellow–the better to see the billboard-size banners that festoon the aisles and walls. “Our vision,” reads one, “is the world’s most customer-centric company. The place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Another banner floats above one of the aisles and lists the company’s Six Core Values (“customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar and innovation”). It’s like the Cultural Revolution meets Sam Walton. It’s dotcommunism!

The Chairman himself has been on a Long March for the past five years, and shows no signs of tiring. Bezos is pathologically happy and infectiously enthusiastic. Today’s whistle-stop is typical. As usual he’s smiling, shaking hands and shocking new employees with his distinctive laugh, a rapid honk that sounds like a flock of Canadian geese on nitrous oxide. He’s an average-size man with thinning hair, warm brown eyes and a face that suggests Kevin Spacey with more than a hint of Frank Perdue. His uniform tends to be white or blue button-down shirts with collars that efficiently snap rather than button down. Also khakis. You get the feeling that if he wore a tie (he doesn’t), it would fly behind him like the parachute behind a dragster. Even now, as he’s supposedly being led on a tour of the warehouse, he’s at the front of the line, sailing down a narrow corridor that doglegs and decants into a huge room.

For a heartbeat, he’s surprised. Seated there, eight to a row in folding chairs, are the latest recruits: 300 employees leap to their feet as a boss on a p.a. system yells, “Let’s welcome Jeff Bezos!” They give him a standing O. “Thank you!” says Bezos. “Let me say, Thank you for working here!” And he laughs that startling laugh.

He climbs a podium and launches into his Six Core Values speech, which is the linchpin of most of his speaking engagements. He always begins with the watchword of his faith: the customer comes first. “Wake up every morning terrified–not of the competition but of our customers.”

Lots of hands shoot up during the Q.&A. period. “Bloomberg says Amazon is going to fall flat on its face,” asserts one person. Bezos dismisses the comment. “We have a ton of doubters, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t try to convince them,” he says, pointing out that he will start making a profit when the “cone of opportunity” begins to narrow–that is, when there’s no room left for more competitors to enter. The questions go on for 15 minutes. What does your house look like? (It’s lovely, and we are amazingly fortunate to live there, he replies, pointing out that until four months ago, he and MacKenzie, his wife of six years, lived in a 900-sq.-ft. apartment.) Just how many items do we sell? (Eighteen million, so far.) He answers them all, patiently and directly, without a trace of defensiveness, punctuated by the laugh. Finally, a woman in the front says, “I have two questions… One, why the name Amazon? And two…can I have your autograph?”

And then a surprising thing happens. The workers in the first four rows start handing up their white hardhats to be signed too. Then a group of workers behind them gets up and encircles Bezos, proffering hats, dollar bills, scraps of paper–anything–for his signature. Welcome to Bezosville, U.S.A.

FROM A TO E

Some people must be genetically predisposed to explore the frontiers. As a child, Bezos adored Star Trek, but it is unclear that he ever made a connection back then to his ancestors, people whose role in life was that of risk taker, exploring the unknown. The family can trace its American roots to the turn of the 19th century, when a colorful, 6-ft. 4-in. character named Colonel Robert Hall moved to San Antonio, Texas, from his home in Tennessee. A sepia-toned photo of him is framed in Bezos’ living room and shows the man wearing a bizarre outfit stitched together from dozens of different kinds of animal pelts. The settler favored that multicolored garment in later years. “When he walked down the streets of San Antonio, the crowds would part,” says Jackie Bezos, Jeff’s mother and the family historian.

Her great grandfather, Bernhardt Vesper, acquired a 25,000-acre ranch in Cotulla, in the southern part of the state. Jeff would spend summers there with his grandparents, Lawrence Preston (“Pop”) Gise and his wife Mattie Louise Strait (related to country singer George Strait).

Pop was Jeff’s favorite relative. A career government employee, he moved his family to Albuquerque, N.M., where he headed the former Atomic Energy Commission’s operations in a seven-state region before retiring to the Cotulla ranch at a relatively early age.

Jeff’s mother, as smart, headstrong and pioneering as anyone in the clan, married young and gave birth to Jeff on Jan. 12, 1964, when she was 17. The marriage lasted about a year. Jeff has neither memory of nor interest in his biological father. “I’ve never been curious about him. The only time it comes up is in the doctor’s office when I’m asked for my medical history,” he says. “I put down that I just don’t know. My real father is the guy who raised me.”

That guy is Mike Bezos, a Cuban refugee who moved to the U.S. by himself when he was 15 years old, with nothing more than two shirts and a pair of pants. Taken under wing by a Catholic mission, Mike learned English, toiled at many odd jobs and made his way to the University of Albuquerque. While working the night shift as a clerk at a bank, he met Jackie, who was also employed there, and fell in love. They married when Jeff was four.

Jeff was an exceptionally smart child. Fed up with sleeping in a crib, the toddler found a screwdriver and reduced his jail to its component parts. He constantly built models, worked a Radio Shack electronics kit that Pop bought him down to the nubs and endlessly tinkered with stuff. When he was six, his sister Christina was born; a year later, his brother Mark arrived. When the siblings were old enough to get into Jeff’s bedroom, he rigged a buzzer to his door that would go off like a burglar alarm. Later, in what his family has come to think of as the “solar-cooker era”–named after a solar microwave he concocted out of an umbrella and aluminum foil–the garage became his laboratory.

In high school in Miami–his father, an engineer with Exxon, moved the family several times–Jeff became the valedictorian. He didn’t drink, do drugs or even swear. People liked him anyway. And almost every summer, he headed for his grandfather’s ranch in Cotulla. It was the perfect antidote to the brainy world he inhabited the rest of the year. On the ranch he’d ride horses, brand cattle with a LAZY G, fix windmills and tool around in a 1962 International Harvester Scout. He helped his grandpa fix a D6 Caterpillar tractor using nothing but a 3-ft.-high stack of mail-order manuals. “You have to have a lot of patience on a ranch in the middle of nowhere,” he says.

If you ask him today who his heroes were, he names two: Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. The former was a brilliant innovator and a horrid businessman, the latter a good innovator and a great businessman. It wasn’t Disney’s movies that impressed Bezos but his theme parks. He went to Disney World six times. “The thing that always amazed me was how powerful his vision was,” Bezos says. “He knew exactly what he wanted to build and teamed up with a bunch of really smart people and built it. Everyone thought it wouldn’t work, and he had to persuade the banks to lend him $400 million. But he did it.”

AMAZON’S SOURCE

If you had to pick a single eureka! moment, a time when suddenly everything became clear about what the future had in mind for Jeff Bezos, it was on a May day in 1994. The 30-year-old was sitting at the computer in his 39th-floor office in midtown Manhattan, exploring the still immature Internet, and he found a site that purported to measure Net usage. Bezos couldn’t believe it: the Internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year. “It was a wake-up call,” he says. “I started thinking, O.K., what kind of business opportunity might there be here?”

Thinking up business possibilities, in fact, was Bezos’ job at D.E. Shaw, an unusual firm that prides itself on hiring some of the smartest people in the world and then figuring out what kind of work they might profitably do. David Shaw, a former professor of computer science at Columbia University, had been wooed to Wall Street by Morgan Stanley, where he specialized in the arcane field of quantitative analysis–using computers to spot trends in the market. He formed his own company in 1988, initially to carry on that kind of work, but with so much brainpower around the office, it seemed a shame to waste it all on Wall Street. It made sense to pursue other businesses too. During much of his four years at Shaw, Bezos “was sort of an entrepreneurial odd-jobs kind of a person,” Shaw recalled recently.

Bezos had graduated from Princeton University, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. The field was unplanned: he had chosen Princeton for its legendary physics department. Shortly after arriving, however, he discovered that he wasn’t the smartest guy in the world after all. He felt outclassed by the physics jocks and gravitated to comp-sci.

His first job out of school was at Fitel, a start-up that was building a network to handle international financial trades. He spent about two years there, worked about the same amount of time at Bankers Trust, then got an interview at Shaw.

Actually, it was one of Shaw’s partners who interviewed Bezos first and urged the boss to meet him, saying, “He’s going to make someone a lot of money someday.” Shaw agreed, understanding that Bezos was unusual not only for his balanced intellect–he could handle complex logic as well as articulate his thinking–but also for the overall package: smart, creative, personable, precisely the kind of person they wanted. Over time, Bezos became a specialist in researching business opportunities in insurance, software and then the booming Internet.

But how to take advantage of that online explosion? The Net had been, until 1994, a largely commerce-free zone. It was created by the Defense Department to keep its network of computers communicating in case of nuclear attack. The system then evolved into a network over which university and government researchers could exchange messages and data across most computer platforms.

The government decided to get out of the Internet business and allow private companies to step in and develop it. Bezos recalls, “I’m sitting there thinking we can be a complete first mover in e-commerce.” He researched mail-order companies, figuring that things that sold well by mail would do well online. He made a list of the Top 20 mail-order products and looked for where he could create “the most value for customers.” Value, in his equation, would be something customers craved: selection, say, or convenience or low prices. “Unless you could create something with a huge value proposition for the customer, it would be easier for them to do it the old way,” he reasoned. And the best way to do that was “to do something that simply cannot be done any other way.”

And that’s what ultimately led to books. There weren’t any huge mail-order book catalogs simply because a good catalog would contain thousands, if not millions of listings. The catalog would need to be as big as a phone book–too expensive to mail. That, of course, made it perfect for the Internet, which is the ideal container for limitless information.

Bezos needed to learn the book business fast. Fate was his handmaiden: the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention was set for the very next day in Los Angeles. He flew out and spent the weekend roaming the aisles and taking a crash course in the business. Everything he learned encouraged him. The two big wholesalers for books were Ingram and Baker & Taylor. “So I went to their booths and told them I was thinking of doing this.” Books, it turns out, are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them. It seemed to Bezos as if all the stuff “had been meticulously organized so it could be put online.”

Bezos realized he desperately wanted to start his own online bookstore. First he talked it over with MacKenzie. She too had graduated from Princeton, but six years after him; they met at Shaw, where she worked as a researcher. An English-literature major at the university, she had been novelist Toni Morrison’s assistant and now had begun a novel of her own. MacKenzie was all for the adventure.

Next Bezos went to Shaw, who said he was sorry to lose such a talented executive but fully understood Bezos’ desire to strike out on his own. He cautioned him to make sure, however, that this was what he truly wanted to do. Bezos decided to spend the next two days recalculating the risks.

In his typically analytic way, Bezos cast his decision in what he calls the “regret-minimization framework.” He imagined that he was 80 years old and looking back at his life. And suddenly everything became clear to him. When he was 80, he’d never regret having missed out on a six-figure Christmas bonus; he wouldn’t even regret having tried to build an online business and failed. “In fact, I’d have been proud of that, proud of myself for having taken that risk and tried to participate in that thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be such a big deal. It was like the wild, wild West, a new frontier. And I knew that if I didn’t try this, I would regret it. And that would be inescapable.”

Bezos figured that the average Net start-up had a 1 in 10 chance of success; he gave himself a 30% chance. “That’s actually a very liberating expectation, expecting to fail,” he says. That’s exactly what he told his first investors–family and friends: “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money, so don’t invest unless you can afford to lose it.”

“When he called and said he wanted to sell books on the Internet, we said, ‘The Internet? What’s that?'” remembers Mike Bezos, who initially questioned his son’s sanity when he heard him say he was quitting his cushy job to start a company that would probably fail. But this was Jeff, after all, and his parents trusted him and believed in him every moment of his life. In the end, “we talked about it for two minutes,” says Jackie Bezos. They ponied up $300,000, a huge chunk of the money they had saved for retirement. “We didn’t invest in Amazon,” says his mother, “we invested in Jeff.” The ROJ–return on Jeff–was substantial. Today, as 6% owners of the company, they’re billionaires.

On July 4 weekend, Jeff and MacKenzie flew out to Fort Worth, Texas, bid goodbye to his family and headed for Seattle–a city near one of the two big book wholesalers and chockfull of the kinds of Net-savvy people he’d need to hire. MacKenzie drove a 1988 Chevy Blazer that Mike Bezos donated, while Jeff tapped out a business plan on a laptop. On that road trip West, somewhere near the Grand Canyon, Bezos called a lawyer who specialized in start-ups. What do you plan to call your company, the lawyer asked. Bezos liked the sound of Abracadabra, but the word was a little long. “So I said, ‘Cadabra,'” he recalls. “Cadaver?” repeated the lawyer. A few weeks later, Bezos changed the name to Amazon Inc., after the seemingly endless South American river.

The most important person Bezos hired was probably the first: Shel Kaphan, a brilliant programmer in Santa Clara, Calif., and veteran of a dozen start-ups, many of them, in fact, failures. Bezos persuaded him, over the course of a few months, to join his company in Seattle.

His “company” was headquartered in a modest two-bedroom home that Jeff and MacKenzie rented in Bellevue, a Seattle suburb. They converted the garage into a work space and brought in three Sun workstations. Extension cords snaked from every available outlet in the house to the garage, and a black hole gaped through the ceiling–this was where a potbellied stove had been ripped out to make more room. To save money, Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks, at a cost of $60 each. (That frugality continues at Amazon to this day; every employee sits behind a door desk.) MacKenzie agreed to work with the crew a few days a week, helping out with accounting and interviewing–the latter chore often conducted, cheekily, in a nearby Barnes & Noble.

By June 1995 a rudimentary website had been created on a hidden site www.amazon.com:99 now defunct), and 300 friends and family members were sworn to secrecy and invited to crash-test it. “The first time I saw the site, I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is it,'” recalls Shaw. It was simple, functional and wonderful. Kaphan’s code was incredibly elegant and streamlined, allowing pages to be delivered without delay.

On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com opened its site to the world. Bezos simply told all 300 beta testers to spread the word. During the first 30 days, without any press, Amazon sold books in all 50 states and 45 other countries. “Within the first few days, I knew this was going to be huge,” says Bezos. “It was obvious that we were onto something much bigger than we ever dared to hope.”

The company grew and grew and grew. It grew so fast that it surprised him how little he knew. “No plan survives its first encounter with reality,” he says. One night, while Bezos was on his knees complaining about how sore he was from packing, he said to a co-worker, “You know what we need? Kneepads!” The employee looked at him like he was an idiot. “What we need,” the co-worker said evenly, “is packing tables.”

In May 1996, Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn’t yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later–just before Amazon’s initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the IPO. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble, whose national network of bookstores looked unbeatable, prompting George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a prominent technology-analysis firm, to pronounce the company “Amazon.toast.” Other naysayers referred to it as Amazon.org”–“.org being a domain name reserved for nonprofit companies. But Barnesandnoble.com did nothing to stall Amazon’s amazing sales.

The stock began to move too, propelling Bezos’ personal wealth into the tens of millions, then into the hundreds of millions. And then, when analyst Henry Blodget, now with Merrill Lynch, said he believed Amazon was a $400-a-share company, Bezos became another Rockefeller. As of last week, his shares were worth $10.5 billion.

Ah, but money… Who cares about that? Bezos has cashed in less than $25 million worth of his stock, but that’s enough to live well on, come what may. He and his wife live in a sprawling, single-story modern home in the suburbs north of Seattle.

Bezos is beyond talking about his wealth or whether Amazon will be successful. Instead, he talks about a “nirvana” state of consumer service, in which you’ll come to Amazon, and the one thing you’ve been looking for all your life will be featured on the page that day. You may not even know you’ve been looking for the thing or that it even exists, but since the site is so familiar with your consumption habits, it knows.

If the world goes his way, Bezos could become even richer than his neighbor Bill Gates. Then what? “At some point,” he says, giving MacKenzie a hug as the two of them stand around in the kitchen, “we want to figure out how to do philanthropic work that’s highly leveraged. It’s very easy to give away money ineffectively. But doing it well requires at least as much attention and energy as building a successful company.”

He says the trick to solving some of the world’s problems is to think, Amazon-like, in the long term. “Say you want to solve world hunger. If you think in terms of a five-year time frame, you get really depressed; it’s an intractable problem. But if you say, well, let’s see how we could solve this in 100 years–it’s a problem because you’ll be dead by then, but the solution becomes more tractable.”

“Anyway,” he adds quickly, self-deprecatingly, in probably the same way he told people his start-up had only a 30% chance of success, “it’ll be a long time before we build a lasting company.” And then he laughs and laughs and laughs.

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Inside the life and career of Jeff Bezos, the tech CEO who founded Amazon

• Jeff Bezos began his career as a hedge-funder in New York before leaving to start Amazon .
• Amazon struggled to turn a profit at first, but is one of the world's biggest companies today.
• Along the way, Bezos has faced antitrust scrutiny, weathered scandals, traveled to space, and become one of the world's richest people.

Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable names in business.

The 59-year-old tech titan worked at a hedge fund before he left to start Amazon as an online bookseller, ultimately growing it into one of the world's largest companies by revenue. He's also founded space tourism company Blue Origin, which has flown him to the edge of space.

He's a fixture on the world's wealthiest list. Bezos is the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $158 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . His net worth took a slight hit in August 2024, decreasing by $15.2 billion after a stock slump that hit the pockets of many of the world's richest.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tops the list of the world's richest billionaires with a total net worth of $235 billion.

With all of his wealth, Bezos has made some splashy purchases. He's the 24th-largest landowner in the United States with 420,000 acres, according to the 2022 Land Report , with a real estate portfolio boasting mansions in Hawaii, California, Florida, and more. Bezos also owns the world's biggest sailing yacht , a 417-footer that cost an estimated $500 million.

From from his first job flipping burgers at McDonald's to building Amazon into a trillion-dollar company at one point, here's a look at Jeff Bezos' life and career. 

Allana Akhtar and Avery Hartmans contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

Jeff Bezos' mom, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him on January 12, 1964.

She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who later adopted Jeff.

Jeff didn't learn that Miguel, who often goes by Mike, wasn't his real father until he was 10 years old, but he told Wired he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.

In 1968, his mother told his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives.

When author Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his 2013 book "The Everything Store," Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.

From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers at his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.

Decades later, Bezos purchased his own land in Texas . His acreage is used as the launch site for Blue Origin rockets.

Bezos described his grandfather, Preston Gise, as an intelligent, quiet man who has been an inspiration to him. 

At a commencement address in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him "it's harder to be kind than clever."

Bezos' first job was cooking burgers at a McDonald's in Miami.

Bezos described the gig at McDonald's as "really hard" in a 2001 interview with Fast Company.

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers. This was my acned-teenager stage. They were like, 'Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'" Bezos said.

As a child, Bezos fell in love with reruns of the original "Star Trek" and became a fan of later versions too.

He even considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, a reference to a line from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, according to the book "The Everything Store." Bezos also considered naming Amazon Cadabra .

In 2016, Bezos even filmed a cameo in a "Star Trek" movie.

At his South Florida high school, Bezos said he wanted to be a "space entrepreneur."

Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age. When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed, according to an account in the book "The Everything Store."

In school, Bezos would tell teachers that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Of course, he's made that dream a reality: He now owns space exploration company Blue Origin.

To avoid spending a summer flipping burgers at McDonald's, Bezos and his high school girlfriend started a summer camp.

Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids, focused on science, math, and reading.

The camp had six kids who each paid $600 for the session — though two of them were Bezos' siblings. "The Lord of the Rings" series was required reading , and science lessons focused on fossil fuels and space.

In 2017, Amazon reportedly paid around $250 million to secure the rights to make a "Lord of the Rings" TV show, with Bezos himself said to be personally involved in the negotiations to land the deal. The company went on to spend an estimated $1 billion producing the first season of the show, making it one of the most expensive seasons of television ever.

Upon graduating high school in 1982, Bezos enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in computer science.

Upon graduation, he turned down job offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a telecommunications startup called Fitel, according to the book "The Everything Store."

After he quit Fitel, he went to Bankers Trust where he worked as a product manager.

While at Bankers Trust, Bezos focused on selling software pension-fund client.

He left Banker's Trust after two years for hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He became a senior vice president after only four years of working at D.E. Shaw . 

Meanwhile, Bezos was taking ballroom dancing classes as part of a scheme to increase what he called his "women flow."

The term was a play on Wall Street's "deal flow" and referred to the number of opportunities he had to meet women.

He ended up meeting his future wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at work.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was a D.E. Shaw research associate. The pair married in 1993 and they went on to have four kids together.

By 1994, Bezos's eye was on the internet, after reading about the web's immense growth in one year.

Bezos decided he needed to find some way to take advantage of its rapid growth. He made a list of 20 possible products to sell online and decided books were the best option, according to "The Everything Store" book. 

He decided to leave D.E. Shaw — a stable and lucrative job — in 1994 to start what would become Amazon.

His boss at the firm, David E. Shaw, tried to persuade Bezos to stay , but Bezos was already determined to start his own company.

MacKenzie and Jeff flew to Texas to borrow a car from his father, and then they drove to Seattle, which would become Amazon's headquarters.

Bezos was making revenue projections in the passenger seat the whole way, though the couple did stop to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Once they arrived, Bezos started Amazon.com in a garage.

He held most of his meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble — which would soon become a competitor.

In the early days, a bell would ring in the office every time someone made a purchase.

Amazon's employees would gather to see if anyone knew the customer.

But it took only a few weeks before it was ringing so often that the company put an end to the bell, according to the book "The Everything Store."

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and more than 45 different countries.

In 1997, less than three years after it was founded, Amazon went public on May 15.

More than 20 years after its IPO, Amazon now has a market cap of $1.4 trillion and is one of the world's five largest public companies.

When the dot-com crash came, analysts called the company "Amazon.bomb." But it weathered the storm.

The website ended up being one of the startups that wasn't wiped out.

Amazon has now gone beyond selling books to offering almost everything you can imagine.

The company has hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world and offers appliances, clothing, groceries, toiletries, and even cloud computing services.

In the early days, Bezos was said to be a demanding boss.

Bezos could explode at employees , and rumors circulated that he hired a leadership coach to help him tone it down. He also reportedly gave sarcastic responses when he was upset. 

At one point, Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.

Instead, Bezos required his staff to turn in papers on their proposals. This, he believed, would encourage critical thinking.

Bezos is also known for creating a frugal company culture.

This contrasts with other big tech firms, which offer free food and perks. 

Bezos told Business Insider in 2014 that Amazon did offer great amenities to its employees, but they just weren't the same as other tech companies. 

His time leading Amazon was not without controversy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon saw a surge in demand as more people were forced to shop online. But the company faced criticism over its treatment of workers , who said the company paid little attention to their health and safety at its fulfillment centers nationwide.

Amazon delivery drivers , who are contractors employed by third-party companies, have also spoken out about the demands of their jobs. Some drivers say Amazon's emphasis on metrics has forced them to use their delivery vans as bathrooms or sacrifice safety to deliver packages on time.

Amazon has faced antitrust concerns , particularly over its treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. Bezos and other tech CEOs were called to testify before Congress in 2020.

He's also gotten rich as an early investor in Google.

Bezos invested $250,000 in Google . That translated to 3.3 million shares when the company went public in 2004.

Today, that would be worth more than $400 million. Bezos hasn't said whether he kept any of his stock after the initial public offering.

Despite his high net worth , Bezos had the same annual base salary for decades while he was CEO: $81,840.

His annual total compensation for many years exceeded $1 million owing to costs related to security and business travel.

In July 2017, Bezos became the world's richest person for the first time.

He momentarily surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a net worth of more than $90 billion.

Today, Bezos is worth $157 billion, and he said he will give most of his wealth to charity.

Some of his more notable contributions include pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund , donating $200 million to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum , and pledging $100 million towards recovery efforts on Maui , where he owns a $78 million home, following the catastrophic wildfires.

But he's also spending his money on other business pursuits.

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

And he's spent an unknown amount on the private space tourism company Blue Origin.

The company made history in 2015 when it successfully launched a reusable rocket.

The rocket, called New Shepard, traveled to an altitude of 62 miles. 

Bezos' interest in flying has gotten him into trouble in the past.

In 2003, Bezos almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas while scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin.

Over the years, Bezos has also built quite the real estate portfolio.

He is the country's 24th largest landowner with 420,000 acres.

In January 2017, Bezos was revealed as the anonymous buyer of the Textile Museum in DC's Kalorama neighborhood.

The property sold for $23 million, and with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, it is the largest home in Washington, DC.

Bezos also owns five apartments at 212 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

His most recent purchase in the city was in 2021, when he paid a reported $23 million for a four-bedroom unit. He's spent a total of $119 million on apartments in the building.

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner Estate, a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills, California.

He purchased the property for $165 million , making it California's most expensive real estate transaction at the time. Bezos bought the mansion from David Geffen, who had purchased it in 1990 for $47.5 million.

In 2021, Bezos bought a home in Hawaii located in an isolated area on Maui's south shore near lava fields. Bezos' Maui home reportedly cost $78 million.

Most recently, Bezos scooped up a $68 million waterfront mansion in Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village.

The sale to Bezos was record-breaking on the island, which has also been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they were divorcing.

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Jeff and MacKenzie announced on Twitter they had finalized the terms of their divorce in April 2019.

MacKenzie, who changed her last name to Scott, retained more than $35 billion in Amazon stock , making her one of the world's richest women.

Scott, whose net worth is $36 billion, has donated at least $14.5 billion since 2019 , when she vowed to give away most of her fortune in her lifetime.

Shortly after they announced their divorce, news broke that Bezos was dating TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

At the time, the National Enquirer said it had obtained texts and explicit photos the couple had sent to each other. The publication also said at the time that it had "raunchy messages" between Bezos and Sanchez . 

Bezos immediately launched an investigation into who had leaked his personal messages.

Soon after, he dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post accusing National Enquirer publisher AMI of trying to blackmail him .

"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote.

Since then, Bezos and Sanchez have had a whirlwind few years.

The couple are often captured traveling around the world together . They've been spotted attending Wimbledon together, yachting with other moguls and celebrities, and vacationing in Saint-Tropez and St. Barths.

Throughout the summer, they've frequently been spotted on Bezos' new yacht.

The ship, which cost an estimated $500 million to build , is at 417 feet long and said to be the largest in the world. 

In May, multiple outlets reported that the pair had gotten engaged.

They marked the engagement with a  party in August attended by guests like Bill Gates and Kris Jenner.

In February 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon's CEO and transition to executive chairman after 27 years at the company's helm.

Bezos said that he planned to spend more time on philanthropy — including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund — as well as his two other major endeavors: The Washington Post and his rocket company, Blue Origin.

In July of 2021, he took an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft.

The trip marked his company's first human spaceflight .

He was accompanied by his brother, Mark; a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen ; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the '60s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.

Though Bezos remains the second-richest person in the world today, his wealth took a tumble this year and last year.

In Forbes' annual ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, Bezos came out as the biggest loser: His net worth fell $57 billion from March 2022 to March 2023, but still sat at a cool $114 billion at the time.

Amazon's stock fell 50% in 2022, and it became the first public company to ever lose $1 trillion in market value . Don't feel too bad for him — with Amazon's stock bouncing back this year, Bezos' wallet has largely recovered.

In August 2024, Bezos net worth took another hit when it fell by $15.2 billion. The loss was triggered by a stock slump that saw the world's richest billionaires lose a total of $134 billion.

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Beating expectations, real estate, charitable donations, media, high tech, glass, and travel, the way-out-there ideas, the bottom line.

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How Jeff Bezos Became One of the World’s Richest People

Erika Rasure is globally-recognized as a leading consumer economics subject matter expert, researcher, and educator. She is a financial therapist and transformational coach, with a special interest in helping women learn how to invest.

As of Feb. 21, 2024, Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $191 billion, making him the third-richest person in the world. His fortune eclipses that of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and legendary investor Warren Buffett .

Bezos is the founder, former chief executive officer (CEO), and now executive chair of the global e-commerce company Amazon. The company accounted for 37.6% of online retailer market share in the U.S. in 2023. As digitalization and the cloud computing revolution reshapes human behavior, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is forecasted to propel higher.

Raised by a teen mom and Cuban immigrant stepfather, Bezos once told his school teachers, “The future of mankind is not on this planet.” Jeff Bezos's boss discouraged his resigning from his stable job as a hedge fund executive with D. E. Shaw & Co. to start Amazon in 1994.

Key Takeaways

• Jeff Bezos’s net worth is $191 billion as of Feb. 21, 2024, making him the third-richest person in the world.
• Bezos is the founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Amazon. He remains the executive chair of the company.
• He holds traditional investments, such as real estate and shares in other companies.
• Bezos has funded several education projects through the Bezos Family Foundation.
• On July 20, 2021, Bezos and three others boarded the New Shepard spacecraft and completed the first successful crewed flight of his space exploration company, Blue Origin.

Investopedia / Josh Seong

Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. Upon graduating, he turned down offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a startup called Fitel. He helped launch a news-by-fax service company with Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET, which failed and led Bezos to become the youngest senior vice president at a hedge fund called D. E. Shaw.

Bezos was enthralled that the Internet was growing at 2,300% annually in 1994, and his idea for Amazon was born. Amazon.com, a platform for selling books, grew out of a garage with his $10,000 investment. Bezos, his wife, and two programmers conducted most meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. After launching in July 1995, Amazon sold books in every U.S. state and 45 countries.

Bezos tried to raise capital by estimating $74 million in sales by 2000, far below the reality: $1.64 billion in sales in 1999 alone. He gathered $1 million in seed funding from angel investors after investments from his family. The first approximately 20 investors in Amazon with a $50,000 stake rounded to 1% would grow to be worth $3.5 billion, representing a 70-times return in about 20 years.

In June 1996, Amazon raised another $8 million in Series A from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Amazon went public in May 1997 and was one of the few startups that survived the dot-com bust . Annual sales skyrocketed from $511,000 in 1995 to over $3 billion in 2001.

Amazon’s share price reflects its phenomenal growth. The stock increased about 450% from January 2016 to January 2021 and rose 60% from January 2020 to January 2021 alone. Starting in 2022 through early 2023, the stock saw a continuous downward trend but has almost reached 2021 levels as of 2024. Bezos owns 12.3% of Amazon as of 2023, making it the primary source of his wealth. The company’s 2023 annual meeting announcement showed Bezos owning more than 1 billion shares.

$574.8 billion

Amazon's net sales for 2023.

Jeff Bezos has holdings in traditional investments, such as real estate. His 165,000-acre Corn Ranch in Texas was acquired as the base of operations for his aerospace company, Blue Origin, and serves as the test site for the vertical-landing, manned, suborbital New Shepard rocket.

His homes include multimillion-dollar holdings on the East and West Coasts in Beverly Hills and Manhattan. Bezos’s New York presence is reported to have boosted Century Tower property values, with space selling for $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot. He also has a lakeside property in Washington state, on which he spent $28 million to increase the living space to almost 30,000 square feet. He also bought a yacht worth $500 million, which launched in 2023.

In 2012, Amazon bought its own South Lake Union headquarters building in Seattle for $1.5 billion, making it one of the largest commercial property owners. Amazon took possession of nearly a dozen buildings, almost 2 million square feet of office space, and approximately 100,000 square feet of retail space. In August 2017, The Seattle Times  reported Amazon had as much office space as the region's 40 largest employers combined, at 8.1 million square feet.  

Jeff Bezos has invested sizable sums in charitable donations. In addition to the Bezos Family Foundation funding several education projects, Bezos has made multimillion-dollar charitable contributions to Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry and his alma mater, Princeton University.

In January 2018, Bezos and his now ex-wife, MacKenzie, pledged $33 million to TheDream.US, an organization working to improve college access for undocumented immigrant youth brought to the United States as young children. The grant provides college scholarships to 1,000 U.S. high school graduates with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status.  

Bezos has an affinity for the technology sector and media and communication services that connect people. Bezos invested in Twitter Inc. (now X Corp.) and the popular business news website Business Insider . In 1998, Bezos became an early investor in Google. While he hasn’t revealed what amount of the stock he owns after its initial public offering in 2004, his $250,000 investment is likely worth billions today. Zocdoc Inc. and Nextdoor are platforms for connecting people in which Bezos has also invested.

Jeff Bezos has invested more than $30 million in the transportation company Uber. One of his notable investment successes is Workday Inc. which provides human resource services in the cloud. Shortly after Bezos’s venture capital investment in the company, it went public in an  initial public offering (IPO) that garnered more than $684 million.

Bezos has also invested in glassybaby, which makes glass-blown holders for votive candles.

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Its audience and traffic exploded, surpassing The New York Times for the first time in terms of U.S. unique web viewers in October 2015.

In 2013, Bezos revealed his plans for the company’s revolutionary Amazon Prime subscription business to use drones to make deliveries to customers. In 2022, the first Amazon Prime Air drone deliveries began servicing limited areas with plans for future expansion.

Bezo invested in the 10,000-year clock project to build a clock into the side of the Sierra Diablo mountain range in Texas, which would tick for 10,000 years. The clock will have a chime generator that generates a different chime sound each day. Bezos explained the clock's need by saying today’s global problems require “long-term thinking.”

The F-1 engine retrieval project salvaged engines that powered the Apollo 11 flight to the moon from the Atlantic Ocean. Artifacts were recovered to fashion displays out of two F-1 engines. The artifacts were donated to The Museum of Flight in Seattle in 2015. With his booming wealth, Bezos fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a space entrepreneur.

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, which worked.

On July 20, 2021, Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen boarded the New Shepard and completed Blue Origin’s first successful crewed flight, reaching an altitude of just above 62 miles before landing safely.

How Much Money Does Jeff Bezos Have?

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $191 billion as of Feb. 21, 2024. Given that his 12.3% Amazon stake accounts for a large portion of his wealth, his net worth can fluctuate significantly depending on the value of the company’s stock.

What Companies Does Jeff Bezos Own?

In addition to founding Amazon, Bezos also owns The Washington Post and space exploration company Blue Origin.

What Companies Are in Jeff Bezos’s Stock Portfolio?

In addition to his 12.3% stake in Amazon, Bezos has also invested in Uber, Airbnb, and Business Insider .

Through his startup, Amazon, Bezos created one of the most successful companies in the world, which brought him immense wealth. He lost the title of the richest man on Earth in 2021, but he remains the third-wealthiest person in 2024. Only Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk exceed Bezos's wealth.

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Jeff Bezos Knows Who Paid for Him to Go to Space

The world’s richest man commissioned the rocket, but his Amazon empire—the customers and the workers—covered the bill.

Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on July 20, 2021.

VAN HORN, Texas—Jeff Bezos really flew to space. This morning, the richest person on Earth boarded a reusable rocket he dreamed up and funded, launched to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then came back down.

Bezos made the trip with three people who decided they trusted him enough with their lives: his brother, Mark Bezos; Wally Funk, a storied aviator ; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. Before today, Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, had not flown its rocket with any people on board. By going first, Bezos wanted to prove that his vehicle is safe, and that Blue Origin is finally ready to make its 11-minute suborbital trips an experience people can buy .

The journey was lightning-fast by spaceflight standards. The Blue Origin rocket rose into the sky with a rumble that echoed across the West Texas desert, and about 11 minutes later, it was all over—the passenger capsule parachuted down, and the Bezos brothers, Funk, and Daemen climbed out, grinning widely. The rocket was back on the launchpad, standing tall, after tearing through the atmosphere with a sonic boom. For this crew, Blue Origin had made spaceflight feel almost as smooth as same-day shipping.

The passengers flew on a rocket called New Shepard, named for the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. They followed a similar trajectory as Shepard did in 1961, but the Blue Origin experience is thoroughly, well, Amazon-like. Shepard, a military pilot, spent months preparing to fly his NASA capsule. Future Blue Origin customers need only show up a few days before launch for some light training on their fully autonomous ride.

Most people know Bezos primarily as the founder of Amazon—in the least flattering version, an ultra-wealthy boss who overworks his employees and hasn’t always paid his share of federal income taxes. But for Bezos, space came first. He remembers watching Apollo 11’s moon landing on his family’s television as a 5-year-old, and as a high-school valedictorian, he spoke about the importance of space travel. If Bezos were anyone else, the story of his spaceflight, of a dream fulfilled, would be simple and sweet.

But if Bezos were anyone else, he wouldn’t have been able to fulfill this dream at all. At a press conference after the launch, Bezos thanked Blue Origin's engineers, and then added, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all this.” Because of Amazon, he is the richest person on Earth , who controls the daily life of so many others here—not just his employees, but the hundreds of millions of us who partake, sometimes grudgingly, in the products he owns. Bezos benefits when we buy things (Amazon), eat (Whole Foods), read movie trivia (IMDb), rate books (Goodreads), manage our homes (Alexa), catch up on the news ( The Washington Post ), and go online (Amazon Web Services). We live in the world Bezos built. In that sense, as he floated over the Earth, taking in the beautiful view, he was surveying his kingdom, and adding one more dimension to his realm.

Richard Branson may have beaten Bezos to space, but Blue Origin is working on an even bigger rocket that could fly people and payloads well beyond the edge of space, into orbit around Earth. It’s also developing, with the help of a couple of longtime NASA contractors, technology to return American astronauts to the surface of the moon, by the 2024 deadline that Donald Trump set and that Joe Biden has so far kept . NASA originally chose Elon Musk’s SpaceX for this job, but while Musk joked about the situation—tweeting that Blue Origin “can’t get it up (to orbit) lol”—Bezos directed his staff to formally contest the space agency’s decision. SpaceX’s contract is now on hold .

For Bezos, today’s flight wasn’t just a joyride. The space billionaire still has more to prove. As a businessman, he already has a comfortable hold on the American way of life. As a spaceman, he wants a hold on its way of life among the stars.

The day before he flew to space, Bezos walked around his facility in the West Texas desert, dressed for the part of a cowboy . Big hat, shiny belt buckle, pointed boots—a very different man from tech-scion Bezos , in his puffer vest and aviator sunglasses. He remains buff, the result of an exercise regimen that, according to one of his friends, he took up several years ago so that he could be in good shape for spaceflight.

Bezos spent the summers of his childhood and early teenage years on his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas, fixing windmills, helping castrate cattle, and working his way through the science-fiction collection of the local library, as the journalist Christian Davenport recounts in The Space Barons , a book about Bezos and the other space billionaires. In college, Bezos was the president of a spaceflight club and attended lectures by Gerard O’Neill, the physicist who dreamed of space stations kept in perpetual motion to produce artificial gravity. “It’s always the science-fiction guys,” Bezos later said, according to Davenport. “They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and make it happen."

It helps, of course, when the builders are billionaires. Bezos founded Blue Origin—named for the pale blue dot where humankind arose—in 2000. He was already extraordinarily rich, and he had little trouble buying up land in West Texas to start developing rocket technology in secret. When the company successfully launched its New Shepard rocket for the first time, in 2015, it announced the news a day later, through a carefully curated press release. Bezos was not in a rush back then; Blue Origin’s mascot is a tortoise, and for years Bezos, who would devote one day of his workweek to Blue Origin, was content to move slowly and let the hare in the industry, Musk, run loose. Occasionally they tussled. After Blue Origin launched a rocket and then landed it upright—a historic first in the rocket business—Musk praised Bezos, but made sure to point out that Blue Origin had reached only the edge of space, not orbit . When SpaceX achieved the same feat with an orbital rocket a month later, Bezos playfully ignored the distinction, congratulating Musk with a “Welcome to the club!” Bezos remained unperturbed as Musk raced ahead—until this year, when that NASA moon contract swung out of reach, and something shifted.

Now Blue Origin has made an effort to draw people into Bezos’s space world. The day before the launch, the usually press-averse Bezos gave interviews to the major TV networks while dressed in his cobalt-blue flight suit, with his fellow passengers at his side. Hours before the flight, in the middle of the night, dozens of reporters gathered at the Van Horn Community Center to board shuttles to Blue Origin’s remote facility north of town. Signs of the space company’s presence are sprinkled around Van Horn—a banner stuck to the Cactus Cantina restaurant on the main drag, a mural of the Bezos brothers painted on the side of an abandoned storefront. The locals speak of the Blue Origin site as if it were a mystical place, shrouded in a force field few can penetrate. It is certainly no Cape Canaveral; a safety briefing for reporters warned of the myriad dangers of the remote site, from hazardous materials to wild hogs. As the press bus drove out of the community-center parking lot and into the darkness, I realized that I had flown nearly 2,000 miles and driven 115 miles to get here, but I had no idea where Blue Origin was taking me. It felt like being invited to a reclusive, eccentric person’s home for dinner, only the host was going to launch into space during the main course.

Bezos’s entire endeavor, historic as it might be, seems to some people like pure excess, the whim of a leader who has lost touch with the average person’s sense of the world. Even some of Blue Origin’s employees have had concerns; in April 2020, as the coronavirus swept across the United States, The Verge ’s Loren Grush reported that some workers felt that managers were pressuring them to keep up the pace, prioritizing the development of New Shepard over their health and safety.

As the day of Bezos’s flight drew closer, critics asked him to read the room , to pay more attention to Earth and spend money on problems closer to home. Bezos did—a bit, by billionaire standards— donating $19 million from Blue Origin’s coffers to space-related organizations, and $200 million of his own fortune to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. After his flight, Bezos announced more giveaways—$100 million each to the news anchor Van Jones and the chef José Andrés, who both run nonprofit organizations, to distribute to whatever charities they like.

The criticism of space travel as frivolous is as old as the act itself; in the golden age of NASA, the ire was directed at a government deemed neglectful of its constituents; in the gilded age of private space tourism, it is aimed at billionaires seen as frivolous. But paying attention to Earth and looking toward the stars are not contradictory acts, nor does one come at the detriment of the other. As Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire, recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “We don’t actually face a choice between basic human needs and exciting journeys into the universe.” While NASA has some responsibility to get the public’s buy-in for its missions beyond Earth, the space billionaires don’t. They can try, as Bezos and Branson have done, but the sell is harder when part of their motivation is so obviously personal.

For Bezos in particular, selling the value of such a journey is a different challenge from any other he has attempted. People might not like how he runs Amazon, but they need toilet paper, or scissors, or a book, or some other mundane item that the company can provide, faster and with greater customer ease than anyone else. Amazon and Bezos’s other companies have population-size customer bases; Blue Origin, given the cost of a ticket—which remains under wraps, but is rumored to be several hundred thousand dollars—will have far fewer customers, at least in Bezos’s lifetime. No one needs to go to space right now.

But Bezos believes humankind will need to soon—not just the elites who can afford Blue Origin’s services, but all kinds of people. The space-nerd valedictorian told his classmates that people should move to space in order to preserve the Earth, and as an adult he still believes that . Of the space billionaires, Bezos is perhaps the most nostalgic. He has named his rockets after the spacefarers of NASA’s early years, and scheduled his spaceflight for the anniversary of the first moon landing. Bezos once organized a secret, expensive expedition to scour the seafloor off the coast of Florida in search of the discarded engines from the gargantuan rocket that lofted the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon. When the hardware was hauled onto the ship, Bezos was on deck, wiping the salty mud off the wreck like it was treasure.

Bezos has made himself a significant character in the story of American spaceflight, intertwining his achievements with those of spacefarers past. Bezos did today what someone else accomplished 60 years ago, but what he can do next, now that he’s back on Earth, sets his achievement apart. Given an opening for business, Bezos will exploit it to its most ambitious, sprawling end. There, at the edge of space, what possibilities did he see?

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Early years

Launching blue origin, getting to space, work outside of spaceflight, additional resources.

Jeff Bezos is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blue Origin , a private spaceflight company. The company is known for its work on New Shepard — a reusable suborbital space rocket that includes a crew capsule for future paying passengers. 

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is counting down for its first crewed flight on July 20, when it will launch Bezos and three others into space. 

Related: Blue Origin will launch billionaire Jeff Bezos into space on July 20. Here's how to watch.

New Shepard made a world-first, first-stage rocket landing on land in 2015. Blue Origin is also working on a larger, orbital rocket called New Glenn that is expected to fly sometime toward the end of 2022.

Born to teenage parents, Bezos had an itinerant childhood that saw him grow up in several U.S. cities. He spent the summers at his grandfather's ranch in Texas.

"His grandfather sparked and indulged Jeff's fascination with educational games and toys, assisting him with the Heathkits and the other paraphernalia he constantly hauled home to the family garage," read a 2004 profile of Bezos in Wired magazine. (Heathkits were do-it-yourself kits for building electronic products.)

"Picture the scattered components of a robot; an open umbrella spine clad in aluminum foil for a solar cooking experiment; an ancient Hoover vacuum cleaner being transformed into a primitive hovercraft."

Bezos' energy for innovation kept his family busy as he was growing up, but his interests did not wane as he got older. Even as a teenager, Bezos wanted to get involved in space — not as an astronaut, but as an entrepreneur. It seemed a heady dream for a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, but Bezos was determined. First, though, he would need to make a pile of money.

He chose the nascent field of computer science to make his fortune, getting his start working for several companies in the field. In 1994, Bezos founded Amazon with a plan to sell books over the Internet. From humble beginnings in his garage, Bezos expanded his e-business into an empire, selling everything from toasters to clothing to car parts. Amazon also burst into the e-publishing market with the Kindle, and brokered agreements with publishers to sell new electronic books at a reduced price compared to hardcovers.

In 2000, shortly after Bezos was named Time's Person of the Year for his work with Amazon, he turned his attention to space. He founded Blue Origin, which would develop a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket ship that could pop passengers into suborbital space.

Bezos kept his plans under wraps for years, Space.com previously reported . Most of the company's information came out through mandatory disclosures to the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA as Bezos sought regulatory approvals and funding.

It wasn't until the late 2000s when Blue Origin had a detailed website and promotional materials available on it, in stark contrast to other billionaire-run spaceflight companies, such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

In 2011, Blue Origin faced a major setback, when a vehicle was destroyed during a test. Bezos revealed the failure a week after the fact in a short blog post on Blue Origin's website , explaining that a flight instability affected the angle of attack and ultimately caused the vehicle to crash.

In October 2012, Blue Origin revealed it had conducted a successful rocket escape test , which is a key milestone in rating the spacecraft safe for humans to ride. Although the system is supposed to work on the suborbital spacecraft, the company also plans to use the technology for its orbital flights. 

Related: Photos: Glimpses of secretive Blue Origin's private spaceships

One of Blue Origin's ultimate goals is to commercially launch a rocket called New Shepard — named after Alan Shepard , the first American to fly in space in 1961. The rocket has a crew module, as well as a propulsion section that boosts the ship for the first few minutes of flight. 

Related: Infographic: Blue Origin's secretive space vehicle explained

Blue Origin received $22 million in 2011 under NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program to spur the development of New Shepard's design and escape system. All told, the company garnered about $26 million from NASA in the first two rounds of funding, but was not included in subsequent rounds. (NASA ultimately selected SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 as the spacecraft to begin bringing crews to the International Space Station.)

The rocket's reusable first stage was the first in the world to touch down safely on land, in 2015, and has made several successful test flights since then. A Dec. 12, 2017, flight successfully carried a mannequin called Skywalker to space and back, as well as performed several revenue-generating experiments.

Related:  Blue Origin's amazing NS-11 New Shepard test flight in photos

New Shepard's seventh test launch on Oct. 13, 2020 reached a maximum altitude of 346,000 feet (105 kilometers), Space.com previously reported . 

On Jan. 14, 2021, Blue Origin launched its upgraded New Shepard spacecraft for astronauts, the RSS First Step, Space.com previously reported . The capsule reached a maximum altitude of 350,827 feet (106,932 meters), according to Blue Origin. That's about 66 miles (107 km) up, above the traditionally recognized 62-mile (100 km) border of space.

Most recently, on April 14, 2021, the company launched the 15th uncrewed test flight of the reusable New Shepard vehicle, Space.com reported . The mission mimicked what should occur once Blue Origin starts flying passengers. Before the flight, two company employees entered the capsule to practice the procedures that future astronauts will follow before launch; the faux-astronauts then exited the vehicle before the flight, then returned to the capsule to practice post-landing procedures once the capsule returned.

On July 20, New Shepard will carry its first four passengers to suborbital space. The passengers are Bezos, his brother Mark, Mercury 13 aviator Wally Funk , and 18-year-old physics student Oliver Daemen. Daemen is taking the place of the still unnamed auction winner who paid $28 million for a seat on this flight, but had a scheduling conflict.

Related:  Jeff Bezos will join passengers launching into space on Blue Origin's 1st crewed flight

Related: Blue Origin will launch an 18-year-old as its final passenger on 1st crewed flight

Amazon was named the largest online shopping retailer worldwide in 2013. Bezos received a contract valued at $600 million that year from the Central Intelligence Agency on behalf of Amazon Web Services. He also bought the Washington Post for $250 million, and met with Richard Branson (chair of Virgin Galactic) to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities.

Bezos sold about 2 million of his Amazon shares in 2016 (worth $671 million and $756.7 million in two separate transactions). The next year, he hired 130,000 new employees over several company distribution centers. He sold about $1 billion in Amazon stock in late 2017, and initiated another sale in early 2018 to raise cash for Blue Origin.

President Donald Trump complained in 2018 that Amazon (and Bezos) were avoiding taxes and accused the company of anti-competitive business practices. The company's share price temporarily fell by 9%. The share prices increased again, however, around the same time that Stanford University showed that Trump had little power to regulate Amazon in the near term.

• Learn more about the Blue Origin company on their website .
• Keep up with their latest news and announcements by following Blue Origin on twitter . 
• Find out more about NASA's contracts with Blue Origin on NASA's Blue Origin website . 

This article was updated on July 15, 2021 by Space.com Reference Editor Kimberly Hickok. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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Inside the Life and Career of Jeff Bezos, the Tech CEO Who Founded Amazon Everything to know about Jeff Bezos, from high school in Miami to flying in space with Blue Origin.

By Sarah Jackson Aug 25, 2023

Key Takeaways

• Jeff Bezos began his career as a hedge-funder in New York before leaving to start Amazon.
• Amazon struggled to turn a profit at first, but is one of the world's biggest companies today.
• Along the way, Bezos has faced antitrust scrutiny, weathered scandals, traveled to space, and become one of the world's richest people.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider .

Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable names in business.

The 59-year-old tech titan worked at a hedge fund before he left to start Amazon as an online bookseller, ultimately growing it into one of the world's largest companies by revenue. He's also founded space tourism company Blue Origin, which has flown him to the edge of space.

He's a fixture in the world's wealthiest list; currently, Bezos is the third-richest person in the world with a net worth of $158 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index .

With all of his wealth, Bezos has made some splashy purchases. He's the 24th-largest landowner in the US with 420,000 acres, according to the 2022 Land Report , with a real estate portfolio boasting mansions in Hawaii, California, Florida, and more. Bezos also owns the world's biggest sailing yacht , a 417-footer that cost an estimated $500 million.

From his first job flipping burgers at McDonald's to building Amazon into a trillion-dollar company at one point, here's a look at Jeff Bezos' life and career.

Allana Akhtar and Avery Hartmans contributed to an earlier version of this story.

Jeff Bezos' mom, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him on January 12, 1964.

Jeff Bezos with his father, Miguel "Mike" Bezos. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Statue Of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation

She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who later adopted Jeff.

Jeff didn't learn that Miguel, who often goes by Mike, wasn't his real father until he was 10 years old, but he told Wired he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.

In 1968, his mother told his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives.

When author Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his 2013 book, "The Everything Store," Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.

Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age.

When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed, according to an account in the book "The Everything Store."

From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers at his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.

Bezos said he would help vaccinate cattle, fix equipment, and do other chores while at his grandparents. AP Photo/Richard Drew via BI

Decades later, Bezos purchased his own land in Texas . His acreage is used as the launch site for Blue Origin rockets.

Bezos' first job was cooking burgers at a McDonald's in Miami.

Bezos became interested in automation during his time at McDonald's. Joe Raedle/Getty Images via BI

Bezos described the gig at McDonald's as "really hard" in a 2001 interview with Fast Company.

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers. This was my acned-teenager stage. They were like, 'Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'" Bezos said.

Bezos has cited his grandfather, Preston Gise, as an inspiration.

Bezos said his grandfather was an intelligent, quiet man. AP Images via BI

At a commencement address in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him , "it's harder to be kind than clever."

As a child, Bezos fell in love with reruns of the original "Star Trek" and became a fan of later versions too.

Bezos' interest in space goes way back. Paramount Pictures via BI

He even considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, a reference to a line from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, according to the book "The Everything Store." Bezos also considered naming Amazon Cadabra .

In 2016, Bezos even filmed a cameo in a "Star Trek" movie.

At his South Florida high school, Bezos said he wanted to be a "space entrepreneur."

Bezos' space company is called Blue Origin. Getty Images / Blue Origin via BI

In school, Bezos would tell teachers that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Of course, he's made that dream a reality: He now owns space exploration company Blue Origin.

"I do think we have all our eggs in one basket," Bezos said according to a Wired interview in 1999.

To avoid spending a summer flipping burgers at McDonald's, Bezos and his high school girlfriend started a summer camp.

The name of Bezos' summer cap was Dream Institute. Kim Kulish/Getty images via BI

Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids, focused on science, math, and reading.

The camp had six kids who each paid $600 for the session — though two of them were Bezos' siblings. "The Lord of the Rings" series was required reading, and science lessons focused on fossil fuels and space, according to the 1999 Wired article.

Upon graduating high school in 1982, Bezos matriculated at Princeton University, where he majored in computer science.

Princeton University. John Greim / Getty Images via BI

Upon graduation, he turned down job offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a telecommunications startup called Fitel, according to the book "The Everything Store."

After he quit Fitel, he went to Bankers Trust where he worked as a product manager.

Bezos worked at Banker's Trust for about two years. Karl Baron/Flickr via BI

While at Bankers Trust, Bezos focused on selling software to pension-fund clients.

He left Banker's Trust after two years for hedge fund D. E. Shaw.

D.E. Shaw was founded by David Shaw, pictured. D.E. Shaw via BI

He became a senior vice president after only four years, according to a Wired interview.

Meanwhile, Bezos was taking ballroom dancing classes as part of a scheme to increase what he called his "women flow."

Bezos' had an interesting dating strategy. Lisi Niesner/Reuters via BI

The term was a play on Wall Street's "deal flow" and referred to the number of opportunities he had to meet women.

He ended up meeting his future wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at work.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was a D.E. Shaw research associate. The pair married in 1993 and they went on to have four kids together.

By 1994, Bezos's eye was on the internet, after reading about the web's immense growth in one year.

Paul Falardeau via BI

This number astounded him, and he decided he needed to find some way to take advantage of its rapid growth. He made a list of 20 possible products to sell online and decided books were the best option, according to "The Everything Store" book.

He decided to leave D.E. Shaw — a stable and lucrative job — in 1994 to start what would become Amazon.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is silhouetted during a presentation of his company's new Fire smartphone at a news conference in Seattle, Washington June 18, 2014. REUTERS/Jason Redmond via BI

His boss at the firm, David E. Shaw, tried to persuade Bezos to stay, but Bezos was already determined to start his own company. Source: Wired

MacKenzie and Jeff flew to Texas to borrow a car from his father, and then they drove to Seattle, which would become Amazon's headquarters.

Bezos worked on his business plan while the couple were driving across the country, according to Wired. Sara Jaye/Getty Images via BI

Bezos was making revenue projections in the passenger seat the whole way, though the couple did stop to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Bezos started Amazon.com in a garage with a potbelly stove.

Bezos worked out of the garage of a rented house in Bellevue, Washington. Mike Segar/Reuters via BI

He held most of his meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble — which would soon become a competitor.

In the early days, a bell would ring in the office every time someone made a purchase.

AP Photo/Andy Rogers via BI

Amazon's employees would gather to see if anyone knew the customer.

But it took only a few weeks before it was ringing so often that the company put an end to the bell, according to the book "The Everything Store."

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and more than 45 different countries.

Frank Micelotta/Getty Images via BI

In 1997, less than three years after it was founded, Amazon went public on May 15.

When the dot-com crash came, analysts called the company "Amazon.bomb." But it weathered the storm.

The dot-com bust didn't kill Amazon. Mario Tama/Getty Images via BI

The website ended up being one of the startups that wasn't wiped out.

Amazon has now gone beyond selling books to offering almost everything you can imagine.

Amazon has hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world. Shutterstock via BI

The retailer offers, appliances, clothing, groceries, toiletries, and even cloud computing services.

In the early days, Bezos was said to be a demanding boss.

Bezos wasn't always the easiest person to work with. Reuters via BI

Bezos could explode at employees , and rumors circulated that he hired a leadership coach to help him tone it down. He also reportedly gave sarcastic responses when he was upset.

At one point, Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.

Bezos Thomson Reuters via BI

Instead, Bezos required his staff to turn in papers on their proposals. This, he believed, would encourage critical thinking.

Bezos is also known for creating a frugal company culture.

An Amazon office. Business Insider

This contrasts with other big tech firms, which offer free food and perks.

Bezos told Business Insider in 2014 that Amazon did offer great amenities to its employees, but they just weren't the same as other tech companies.

More than 20 years after going public, Amazon now has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.

Amazon has become one of the biggest companies in the world. Alex Wong/Getty Images via BI

Amazon is one of the world's five largest public companies.

His time leading Amazon was not without controversy.

Amazon has come under the spotlight many times. AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais via BI

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon saw a surge in demand as more people were forced to shop online. But the company faced criticism over its treatment of workers , who said the company paid little attention to their health and safety at its fulfillment centers nationwide.

Amazon delivery drivers, who are contractors employed by third-party companies, have also spoken out about the demands of their jobs. Some drivers say Amazon's emphasis on metrics has forced them to use their delivery vans as bathrooms or sacrifice safety to deliver packages on time.

Amazon has faced antitrust concerns , particularly over its treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. Bezos and other tech CEOs were called to testify before Congress in 2020.

He's also gotten rich as an early investor in Google

Google cofounders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin, right. AP via BI

Bezos invested $250,000 in Google . That translated to 3.3 million shares when the company went public in 2004.

Today, that would be worth more than $400 million. Bezos hasn't said whether he kept any of his stock after the initial public offering.

Despite his high net worth, Bezos had the same annual base salary for decades while he was CEO: $81,840.

Security and travel costs for Bezos totaled some $1.6 million in 2016. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via BI

His annual total compensation for many years exceeded $1 million owing to costs related to security and business travel.

In July 2017, Bezos became the world's richest person for the first time.

Bill Gates, left, and Jeff Bezos, right. Getty Images via BI

He momentarily surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a net worth of more than $90 billion.

Today, Bezos is worth $157 billion, and he said he will give most of his wealth to charity.

Bezos has given to a number of causes. REUTERS/Abhishek N. Chinnappa via BI

Some of his more notable contributions include pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund , donating $200 million to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum , and pledging $100 million towards recovery efforts on Maui , where he owns a $78 million home, following the catastrophic wildfires.

But he's also spending his money on other business pursuits.

Amazon was not involved in the deal with The Washington Post. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via BI

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

And he's spent an unknown amount on the private space tourism company Blue Origin.

Bezos made history with his rocket company. Blue Origin via BI

The company made history in 2015 when it successfully launched a reusable rocket.

The rocket, called New Shepard, traveled to an altitude of 62 miles.

Bezos' interest in flying has gotten him into trouble in the past.

Bezos cheated death in 2003. LINDSEY WASSON/Reuters via BI

In 2003, Bezos almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas while scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin.

Over the years, Bezos has also built quite the real estate portfolio.

Jeff Bezos owns all kinds of properties. Stephen Brashear/Getty via BI

He is the country's 24th largest landowner with 420,000 acres.

In January 2017, Bezos was revealed as the anonymous buyer of the Textile Museum in DC's Kalorama neighborhood.

The property dates back to 1912. AgnosticPreachersKid/Wikimedia Commons via BI

The property sold for $23 million, and with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, it is the largest home in Washington, DC.

Bezos also owns five apartments at 212 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Madison Square Park in New York City. Shutterstock via BI

His most recent purchase was in 2021, when he paid a reported $23 million for a four-bedroom unit. He's spent a total of $119 million on apartments in the building.

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner Estate, a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills, California.

The estate has a 13,600-square-foot mansion Los Angeles County/Pictometry via BI

He purchased the property for $165 million , making it California's most expensive real estate transaction at the time. Bezos bought the mansion from David Geffen, who had purchased it in 1990 for $47.5 million.

In 2021, Bezos bought a home in Hawaii located in an isolated area on Maui's south shore near lava fields.

A home in Maui, Hawaii, although not the one Bezos purchased. ejs9/Getty Images via BI

Bezos' Maui home reportedly cost $78 million.

Most recently, Bezos scooped up a $68 million waterfront mansion in Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village.

Indian Creek was ranked the most expensive city in the US in 2021. Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Karwai Tang/WireImage via Getty Images via BI

The sale to Bezos was record-breaking on the island, which has also been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they were divorcing.

The couple decided to split after more than two decades. Dia Dipasupil / Staff via BI

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Jeff and MacKenzie announced on Twitter they had finalized the term of their divorce in April 2019.

MacKenzie was with Jeff before he ever started Amazon. Reuters via BI

MacKenzie, who changed her last name to Scott, retained more than $35 billion in Amazon stock , making her one of the world's richest women.

Scott, whose net worth is $36 billion, has donated at least $14.5 billion since 2019 , when she vowed to give away most of her fortune in her lifetime.

Shortly after they announced their divorce, news broke that Bezos was dating TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

Sanchez and Bezos originally met when both of them were still married. When they started dating is unclear. Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Getty Images via BI

At the time, the National Enquirer said it had obtained texts and explicit photos the couple had sent to each other. The publication also said at the time that it had "raunchy messages" between Bezos and Sanchez .

Bezos immediately launched an investigation into who had leaked his personal messages.

Bezos' head of security helmed the investigation. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via BI

Soon after, he dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post accusing National Enquirer publisher AMI of trying to blackmail him .

"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote.

Since then, Bezos and Sanchez have had a whirlwind few years.

Sanchez and Bezos travel the world together. Reuters/Andrew Couldridge via BI

The couple are often captured traveling around the world together . They've been spotted attending Wimbledon together, yachting with other moguls and celebrities, and vacationing in Saint-Tropez and St. Barths.

Throughout the summer, they've frequently been spotted on Bezos' new yacht.

Bezos and Sanchez hanging out in Portofino. MEGA / Contributor / Getty Images via BI

The ship, which cost an estimated $500 million to build , is 417 feet long and said to be the largest in the world. Bezos may have even put a sculpture of Sanchez on the bow of the ship .

In May, multiple outlets reported that the pair had gotten engaged.

Jeff Bezos and Laura Sanchez in 2022. Jordan Strauss/AP via BI

They marked the engagement with a party in August attended by guests like Bill Gates and Kris Jenner.

In 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon's CEO and transition to executive chairman after 27 years at the company's helm.

Jeff Bezos was succeeded by Amazon executive Andy Jassy. Kevin Winter/Getty Images via BI

Bezos said that he planned to spend more time on philanthropy — including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund — as well as his two other major endeavors: The Washington Post and his rocket company, Blue Origin.

That month, he took an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft.

The rocket had flown 15 times before, but this was it's first time with people onboard. Isaiah J. Downing/Reuters via BI

The trip marked his company's first human spaceflight .

He was accompanied by his brother, Mark; a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen ; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the '60s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.

Though Bezos remains the third-richest person in the world today, his wealth took a tumble last year.

Jeff Bezos. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File via BI

In Forbes' annual ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, Bezos came out as the biggest loser: His net worth fell $57 billion from March 2022 to March 2023 but still sat at a cool $114 billion at the time.

Amazon's stock fell 50% in 2022, and it became the first public company to ever lose $1 trillion in market value . Don't feel too bad for him — with Amazon's stock bouncing back this year, Bezos' wallet has largely recovered.

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The Great Leaders Series: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

Jeff bezos is an e-commerce pioneer who started amazon.com to sell books, and expanded into just about everything else..

Jeff Bezos is one of the founding fathers of e-commerce, and part of a select group of entrepreneurs in that field who managed to survive the dot-com bubble without losing control of their companies. Today, his business, Amazon.com, is an Internet goliath that sells everything from books to laptops to gift baskets. Most recently, the company has acquired Zappos, the online shoe retailer, and unveiled the Kindle, the first e-reader to become a breakout hit. This risky move into consumer electronics shows that Jeff Bezos, having pioneered online retail, is not yet ready to give up the pursuit of innovation.

Bezos' mother gave birth to him while she was still in her teens and his stepfather left Cuba for the U.S. at age 15. Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and later Houston, Texas, Bezos was technically precocious; by one account he disassembled his crib with a screwdriver as a toddler. He graduated from science experiments in his parents' garage, to a computer science degree at Princeton, to a successful Wall Street career. But Bezos wouldn't be a household name if, in 1994, he hadn't noticed the Internet's potential for commerce and abandoned a well-paying job at the investment firm D. E. Shaw, to return to the garage and launch Amazon.

After inviting 300 friends and acquaintances to test his creation, Bezos took the site live and, within a month, the company had sold books in all 50 states and in 45 countries. Within two months, sales topped $20,000 a week. As Amazon's growth accelerated, however, skeptics expected that brick-and-mortar retailers like Barnes & Noble or Borders would soon shoulder the young start-up out of the online book market. Others said the company was burning through its cash too quickly. But Bezos did not back down. 'We're going to be unprofitable for a long time. And that's our strategy,' Bezos told Inc . in 1997.

The doom-and-gloom predictions turned out to be wrong. Amazon earned its first full-year profit in 2003 and, by 2008, the company's revenue had reached $4 billion. The company succeeded in large part because it quickly embraced e-commerce innovations that improved its customer experience. Such standard operating procedures one-click shopping, e-mail verification of orders, and customer product reviews were not on the radar until Amazon adopted them.

As if that wasn't enough, Bezos has made venture capital a side project for Amazon, investing millions of dollars with varying success in start-ups such as Talk Market, a video shopping site; Foodista, which is a user-edited cooking encyclopedia; and the infamous dot-com casualty Pets.com. On the side, he also created an entirely separate company called Blue Origin, which aims to devise the technology for commercial space flight.

Bezos has joked modestly that the success of Amazon was due half to luck, half to timing, and the rest was attributable to brains. In truth, the passion he brings to his business is what sets him apart. 'One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. If you're really interested in software and computer science, you should focus on that,' Bezos told Inc . in 2004. 'But if you're really interested in medicine, and you decide you're going to become an Internet entrepreneur because it looks like everybody else is doing well, then that's probably not going to work. You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you.'

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Further Reading:

America's 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs: Jeff Bezos

Amazon Buys Zappos for More Than $900 Million

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30 Great Entrepreneurs in Their Own Words

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company’s Ambitions

The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making.

Highlights From Blue Origin’s Spaceflight

Blue origin’s first flight to space with humans onboard included the billionaire jeff bezos, his brother mark bezos, wally funk and oliver daemen. the team traveled more than 60 miles above earth..

“There’s Oliver on the left, Jeff Bezos on the right. We are about to go to space, everybody.” “Command engine start — two, one, ignition. We have liftoff. The Shepard has cleared the tower.” And New Shepard has cleared the tower, on her way to space with our first human crew. And booster touchdown, welcome back New Shepard.” “First up, your booster has landed.” “Booster landed.” “Our rocket went over Mach 3. And now they’re coming, floating back down at just about 15 or 16 miles an hour. What a flight.” “Welcome back to Earth. Congratulations to all of you. All of you.” [cheering] “Welcome back, astronauts.”

By Kenneth Chang

VAN HORN, Texas — Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt — rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas — in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin .

While Mr. Bezos was beaten to space last week by Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur who flew in a rocket plane from his company Virgin Galactic, some analysts consider Blue Origin , founded by Mr. Bezos more than 20 years ago, to be a more significant contender in the future space economy. The company has ambitions of a scale far beyond short flights for space tourists, and it is backed by the entrepreneur who made Amazon into an economic powerhouse.

Lori Garver, who served as deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, said that Mr. Bezos “has a huge, long-term vision that is multigenerational.” She added that his intent for Blue Origin was to “compete for even higher stakes” in the growing business of space.

In 2017, Mr. Bezos announced that he would sell $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund the space venture, and Blue Origin has already pursued a range of business opportunities, such as trying to win contracts for a moon lander for NASA astronauts as well as launching satellites for the Department of Defense on large reusable rockets.

In recent years before he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, Mr. Bezos would typically spend a day a week — usually Wednesdays — focused on Blue Origin. That Mr. Bezos himself was seated in the capsule for Tuesday’s space trip makes plain that he is putting spaceflight at the top of his spending list.

“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said a few years ago, couching his investment as a form of philanthropy.

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(born 1964). American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos was the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., which began in the mid-1990s as an online merchant of books but later expanded to include a wide variety of products. Under his guidance Amazon became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web .In 2013 Bezos expanded his interests when he bought The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million. He also founded a company that offered spaceflights to tourists.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While still in high school, he developed the Dream Institute, a center that promoted creative thinking in young students. In 1986 Bezos graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He then undertook a series of jobs before joining in 1990 the investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in New York, New York. Shortly thereafter, Bezos became the firm’s youngest senior vice president. He was in charge of examining the investment possibilities of the Internet , and its enormous potential sparked his entrepreneurial imagination. In 1994 Bezos quit D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle, Washington, to open a virtual bookstore. He began developing the software for the site, which he named Amazon after the South American river, while working out of his garage with only a handful of employees. Amazon sold its first book in July 1995.

Amazon quickly became the leader in e-commerce. The site was user-friendly and open 24 hours a day. It encouraged browsers to post reviews of books and offered discounts, personalized recommendations, and searches for out-of-print books. In June 1998 Amazon began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos. In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores.

The success of Amazon encouraged other retailers, including major book chains, to establish online stores. As more companies battled for the online market, Bezos saw the need to diversify. By 2005 Amazon offered various products, including electronics, clothes and shoes, and hardware. In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle—a digital book reader with a wireless Internet connectivity that enabled customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand ( see e-book ). In 2010 Amazon moved into making its own television shows and movies with its Amazon Studios division.

Amazon’s yearly net sales increased from $510,000 in 1995 to some $600 million in 1998 and from more than $19 billion in 2008 to almost $233 billion in 2018. Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018 at $112 billion, making him the richest person in the world. Two years later Amazon registered record profits. Its revenue in the fourth quarter that year surpassed $100 billion for the first time. The unprecedented numbers were, in part, caused by a rise in home shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic. In July 2021 Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon but remained with the company as executive chairman.

Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000. The company subsequently bought a launch site in Texas. Blue Origin developed a reusable suborbital launch vehicle, New Shepard, which was slated to be used for commercial spaceflights. The company began testing the vehicle in 2015 with unmanned flights. In July 2021—just days after British entrepreneur Richard Branson successfully completed the first commercial spaceflight—Bezos and three others were the first people to travel into space on the New Shepherd. The flight reached an altitude of 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above Earth.

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Jeff Bezos reaches space—a small step toward big spaceflight dreams

The first crewed New Shepard launch carried Bezos, his brother, and the oldest and youngest people to ever go to space: 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and an 18-year-old Dutch student.

This morning, as the sun climbed over a private spaceport in rural West Texas, a six-story-tall rocket lit its engines and lifted off, carrying a spacecraft with four people on board—the first passengers to ride Blue Origin ’s New Shepard rocket to the top of the sky. The rocket hurtled star-ward, and at about 250,000 feet the crew capsule separated from the booster and continued to the edge of the atmosphere, while the rocket fell back to Earth and executed a controlled vertical landing.  

As the capsule climbed, the crew members unbuckled their seatbelts and floated in weightlessness for a few minutes, whooping excitedly as they took in the views out the windows. At 351,210 feet, not quite in orbit but well above the 62-mile line marking the internationally recognized boundary of space , the capsule began to fall. About ten minutes after launch, parachutes helped it safely alight back on Earth.

The flight carried a haphazard crew by spaceflight standards. One of the passengers was Jeff Bezos , founder of Blue Origin and currently the world’s richest person . His brother Mark joined him for the inaugural flight. And perhaps outshining the Bezos brothers, at least for those versed in aerospace history, is Wally Funk , an 82-year old aviator who has dreamed of being an astronaut since the early days of NASA’s human spaceflight program—when   she trained to be an astronaut and outperformed the seven men chosen for the Mercury program on many of the tests , but did not get a chance to go to space.

“It’s dark up here!” Funk exclaimed as she floated in space.

Completing the crew is Oliver Daemen , an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, now the youngest person to visit space. Daemen’s father paid an undisclosed amount for his son to experience weightlessness, see the darkened sky, and gaze at Earth’s curved horizon for a few fleeting minutes.  

“I’ve been waiting for years to see, when are they going to decide to fly humans?” says   Laura Seward Forczyk , founder of the aerospace consulting firm   Astralytical , about Blue Origin. “It’s nice that they’ve finally decided that now is the time—they’ve had this plan for years, so this is a long time coming.”

A small step toward a big dream

Tuesday’s 10-minute flight marks a milestone for Blue Origin. The company has been relatively secretive about the development of its spacecraft compared to industry rivals SpaceX , founded by Elon Musk, and Virgin Galactic , helmed by Richard Branson. Like the latter, which   flew Branson into space on July 11 , Blue Origin plans to offer customer flights aboard New Shepard starting later this year . Those flights will allow up to six people at a time to experience the brief thrill ride to space, which includes some four minutes of weightlessness .

It’s not clear how hefty the price tag for that opportunity will be—but Blue Origin says it has a list of passengers waiting for their turn to make the parabolic journey. One of those is an anonymous customer who bid $28 million for a chance to fly on this inaugural flight but had to postpone the trip to space at the last minute because of “scheduling conflicts,” the company said .  

Blue Origin also has loftier projects waiting in the wings. The company is designing a lunar lander and a larger rocket, called New Glenn , that could carry humans into Earth orbit and beyond—into the realms of space stations and satellites, of moonwalks and envisioned off-world futures.

Bezos has said he founded Blue Origin because he wants to help create a future where millions of people live in space,   residing on lush, rotating manufactured worlds in orbit . Sending passengers on suborbital flights is a logical first step aligned with that vision, says industry analyst   Carissa Christensen , founder and CEO of Bryce Space and Technology , an aerospace consulting firm.

“I take very literally what Jeff Bezos has said publicly, that he really believes in the importance and the value of human access to space, of broadening and expanding that access, of enabling a future where people live and work in space,” Christensen says. “There are plenty of ways for Jeff Bezos to spend his time and his treasure ,” she notes, but he’s chosen to “put his personal finances into a launch company.”

Critics, however, are quick to point out that neither Blue Origin nor Virgin Galactic are really broadening access to space with these commercial flights—at least not yet. These first crews are populated by extremely wealthy individuals and their guests, and many experts question whether such suborbital flights are anything more than joyrides for the ultra-rich. After all, how accessible can space be if the price of a ticket is astronomical?

“Space remains a very elite place—a place that’s hard to get to, a place that’s impossible to reach for 99 percent of humans, and it’s just sort of the flavor of the elite that’s changing,” says space historian   Jordan Bimm of the University of Chicago. “If it took ‘the right stuff’ to get to space in the 1960s, now it kind of takes the right friends—or the right bank accounts. It’s not the utopian vision of space that some people are trafficking in right now, as I see it.”

Blue Origin’s origin

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, but the company stayed under the radar until the Amazon founder picked a spot to build a spaceport: the shrubby, sparsely populated desert just north of Van Horn, Texas, a town of about 2,000 that’s the seat of Culberson County. In 2003, local ranchers began getting   persistent calls from a Seattle-based attorney representing an anonymous client who wanted to buy their land —and who had seemingly bottomless pockets. Some held out until the rising offers grew too lucrative to refuse. But by 2005, Bezos had accumulated 165,000 acres in the region ( an area that has since nearly doubled ), and dubbed the property “Corn Ranch.”

That same year,   he visited Van Horn and revealed his grand design for the site north of town, surprising residents with his vision of a spaceport. From there, Bezos said, a new spaceship would launch, and it would serve as a step in his ultimate goal of sending millions of humans to live and work in space.  

John Conoly, a longtime Culberson County judge, was impressed. “I have every confidence in the world he will do what he says he will do,” Conoly told The Associated Press in 2005. “I know he’s going to have some of the best minds for this project. He doesn’t do things halfway or second class.”  

Step by step

Fast forward to today. Other than a handful of astronauts on the International Space Station, humans are still firmly planted on this planet. The same aura of mystery and determination continues to characterize Blue Origin, although the company has made some public forecasts about when milestones would be reached. Today’s flight, for example, was originally anticipated to occur in 2018 .

It’s just one of many missed deadlines. But Blue Origin presses on.  

“I see Jeff Bezos taking this sort of patient approach, where he doesn’t want the flashiness that you get from Branson or Musk. He’s happy to keep the failures under wraps and just sort of produce win-win-win-win and hope that adds up to something unstoppable,” Bimm says. “I think you have to look at the development of Amazon, and its sort of slow and steady and under-the-surface work that eventually emerged as this juggernaut.”

Fittingly, Blue Origin’s motto is gradatim ferociter , meaning “step by step, ferociously.” Its mascot is a tortoise, perhaps a reference to the plodding reptile that persevered and bested the faster, favored hare.

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In November 2015, the company scored an unexpected win over SpaceX when   it vertically landed a rocket booster for the first time in history —a huge step toward reusability, which is key to the company’s vision.  

Including that first touchdown, New Shepard has achieved 15 successful flights and 14 landings with three boosters, one of which has flown seven times. Those flights brought dozens of   science and educational payloads to the edge of space , including investigations of microgravity’s effects on gene expression, cells, and tissues. Blue Origin has also launched art-related payloads, including two projects produced in partnership with the band OK Go .

Like today’s flight, the boosters from these past flights stuck their landings, and the crew capsules parachuted back to Earth, touching down on land like Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft have done since the 1960s. As Blue Origin works toward launching orbital flights, the company is following a trajectory that was established by NASA at the dawn of the human space age—first head to suborbital space, then rocket into orbit, then attempt more ambitious missions, like building space stations or flying to the moon.

“It’s a bit back to the future,” says   Jennifer Levasseur , a space historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which just received a $200 million donation from Bezos . “We’ve been down this path before in terms of scaling up the capability of rockets. This is not new territory.”

Blue Origin is also working on a rocket engine, called BE-4 , that it sold to fellow launch company United Launch Alliance (ULA)—although   ULA is reportedly frustrated with delivery delays .

The BE-4 engine is also key to Blue Origin’s eagerly anticipated   New Glenn rocket , a planned 321-foot, two-stage vehicle that is being built in a factory that Blue Origin constructed outside of Florida’s Cape Canaveral   in 2016 . After repeated delays, the first New Glenn flight is reportedly slated for 2022 .  

Both New Shepard and New Glenn are named after NASA astronauts who achieved significant firsts in the Mercury program— Alan Shepard , the first U.S. astronaut to make a journey to suborbital space, and John Glenn , the first American to orbit the Earth.

“Bezos is pretty clearly enmeshed in the history component of what he’s doing,” Levasseur says. “He spent millions of dollars to support the effort to retrieve parts of the Apollo launch vehicle from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I saw some of those pieces in the museum just the other day, and reflected on it, and you know, there’s just a long trail of evidence for where we’ve ended up today in terms of what this specific person wanted to achieve.”

Until Wally Funk launched on today’s flight, John Glenn was also the oldest person to visit space, having flown aboard the space shuttle   Discovery   in 1998 at age 77. In the 1960s, Funk outperformed Glenn on many of the exercises she completed while training for spaceflight as part of a private program.   Funk and a dozen other women   dubbed “the Mercury 13”   participated in and passed the same rigorous assessments as NASA’s Mercury 7 —but the space agency wasn’t accepting women as astronauts.

“She was denied her chance to go to space so many times because she was a woman in a time where women were discriminated against ,” Forcyzk says. “Just seeing her fly in space on this Blue Origin flight will be so inspirational to so many people who have followed the history of the Mercury 13 and who know how much of an injustice that was.”  

Building a future in space for everyone

We’re living in an age where wealthy entrepreneurs and government space programs both influence humanity’s off-world future. Musk, Bezos, and Branson each have a vision of what that future looks like. For Musk, it’s on Mars ; for Bezos, it’s closer to Earth .

But translating those dreams into reality is proving tricky, and not just because of technology. Right now, the barrier to entry is astronomical, and space remains the realm of the wealthy and elite, Bimm says. Although Blue Origin has yet to announce a price point for its flights, Virgin Galactic has advertised seats at $250,000 each, and the company, which says   at least 600 tickets have already been reserved , is expected to raise the price .

“We’ve done a number of studies that are finding that there is a meaningful level of demand, by which I mean at least hundreds of people a year at the price point around $250,000,” says Christensen, whose research looks at the future market for suborbital flights. In fact, there is “potential for much more than that, to go into thousands of people a year, if the price drops significantly.”  

There’s little doubt that the first passengers on these flights will be predominantly white and wealthy—as Levasseur points out, rich people have always gone on exotic, expensive voyages, whether to Antarctica, the abyssal seafloor, or the summit of Everest.

Space, however, carries different connotations than destinations on Earth—particularly if future commercial missions shift from joyrides to building a permanent future among the stars.

“Who gets to go to space, and what does that mean, and what does that say about us—the societies that are putting these people in space?” Bimm asks. “Do they really believe that space is for all humankind? What are they basing this utopian idea of spaceflight on, actually?”

Answers to these questions may emerge as commercial suborbital flights continue—but for now, the industry is just getting off the ground. Bimm and other experts say it will be important to keep an eye on the passenger manifests to see how they evolve, and to watch whether some of these early flights include efforts to be more inclusive.

It’s also possible that commercial suborbital flights will not be as enticing as these entrepreneurs hope, and that the enterprise will crumble. But even if that happens, visions of life in space will persist. They always have. And Bimm says it’s key for those with big dreams to recognize that building an existence in space starts here on Earth—that the humans floating through the space stations of the future or watching blue Martian sunsets won’t be able to escape Earth’s issues.

“Space isn’t this transformative place,” Bimm says. “It’s a place where all of our problems on Earth are going to be reproduced or amplified, and we need to see that. We can’t just wear these rose-colored glasses.”

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