Jeff Bezos

Background

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque to parents Jacklyn Gise and Ted Jorgensen, and was raised by Miguel Bezos when his mother married. He spent his summers as a child on his grandfather’s Texan ranch, where he built pipes, vaccinated cattle, and repaired windmills. He earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from Princeton University. He worked on Wall Street for various firms namely — Fitel, Bankers Trust, and D. E. Shaw & Co, New York. While working for D.E. Shaw, Bezos met MacKenzie Tuttle, with whom he married in 1993. They had four children together. After divorcing his wife, Bezos started dating Lauren Sanchez, a former news anchor, T.V. show host, and helicopter pilot.

In 1984, he began working as a Programmer/Analyst in Norway for the summer, and the following year, he enhanced an IBM Program in California. In 1990, he joined D. E. Shaw & Co. in New York and was the company’s youngest Vice President at the time. Despite the fact that their financial situation was quite advantageous, he elected to depart after four years. He went on to create his firm, and in 1995 he became the founder of Amazon.com — an online bookstore. Analysts were leery of its viability in comparison to regular retailers at first, but he quickly overtook such competitors. In 2003, Amazon launched A9, a commercial search engine specializing in e-commerce websites. He also started an online sporting products store with over 3,000 different brands.

Amazon later went on to introduce the Kindle, a portable electronic reading device that uses E-Ink to generate text with customizable font size to improve ease of reading, in 2007. Bezos also announced the Kindle Fire, a color touchscreen tablet computer that competed with Apple’s iPad. Amazon bought e-readers comfort and convenience with lighted touchscreens that permitted reading in the dark with the Kindle Paperwhite. He also paid $250 million cash for “The Washington Post,” and other linked magazines, thereby ending the Graham family’s four-generation dominance. In 2017, Bezos — with a net worth of roughly $90 billion — surpassed Bill Gates as the world’s richest person.