Jeff Bezos Biography
Jeff Bezos is an American businessman, investor, and the richest person in the world as of 2018. He is also the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, an online merchant book and a variety of products.
Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the WWW (World Wide Web). He also purchased The Washington Post newspaper in 2013. He ranks 15th on the Forbes list of billionaires with his net worth of US $34.8 billion.
Jeff Bezos EARLY YEARS & EDUCATION
Jeff was born on 12th January 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. He was born to Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen. He spent his summer with his maternal grandfather in southern Texas. When his mother, Jacklyn, gave him birth, she was in her teenage.
His mother remarried to a Cuban who immigrated to the US, Miguel Bezos. He was only four years old then. He and his mother with stepfather moved to Houston, Texas. His father became an engineer for Exxon.
From 4th to 6th grade he studied at River Oaks Elementary School in Houston. Since his early days, he was interested in science and technology proficiency. He then attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida.
In 1982 he received a Silver Knight Award. During his high school, he was a valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. He studied at Princeton University to study physics but later graduated summa cum laude with two Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.
While he was studying at Princeton, he was honored with Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He with his wife donated $2.5 million to pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington in July 2012.
In 1986 he graduated from Princeton and started working on Wall Street. He then worked for a company called Fitel. Later he worked at Bankers Trust. He also has worked at D.E. Shaw & Co.
THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD LARGEST E-COMMERCE & HIS BUSINESS CAREER
In 1994 he founded Amazon.com. He wrote Amazon business plan on the way when he drove from New York to Seattle. He first set his company in his garage. He is mainly known for his business detail.
He is also the founder of a human spaceflight startup company, Blue Origin in 2000. For a few years the company was kept secret and in 2006 it was publicly known. In 2011 interview, he said that he founded the space company to help enable and to decrease the cost and increase the safety of spaceflight. He was named high school class valedictorian by a 1982 Miami Herald in 2013.
He announced his purchase of The Washington Post on 5th August 2013. He bought it in $250 million in cash. In March 2014 he made a change at the Post and allowed online paywall for subscribers which includes the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Jeff Bezos Achievements and Awards
In 1999, Jeff received his first major award by Time magazine’s Person of the Year. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011, Jeff received an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle by The Economist. Following year, he was named as Businessperson of The Year by Fortune.
In 2014, Bezos was ranked as the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review, and also awarded the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, in 2016. Recently in February of 2018, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous system, and building a commercial pathway for human space flight”.
Jeff Bezos Personal life
Jeff married to his long-term girlfriend, Makenzie Tuttle in 1993. Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Tuttle met each other in 1992 when he was working for D.E. Shaw. The couple moved to Seattle after two years of their marriage.
The couple is blessed with four children: three sons, and a daughter whom they adopted from China.
On 6th March 2003, Jeff was in a helicopter crash while he was flying through his ranch in Texas. Due to wind blew in his small helicopter off-kilter, the pilot had to land the aircraft.
During landing one of its propellers caught on a cedar tree which break the frame of the helicopter. He was sustained from minor injuries and was discharged from hospital on the same day.
Jeff Bezos Net worth
Jeff earns the tremendous amount of money in his career. He was of the first shareholders in the Google to invest $250,000 in 1998, which eventually resulted in 3.3 million shares of Google stock which will be worth more than $3.5 billion.
On 27th July 2017, he became the world’s wealthiest person around the globe with an estimated net worth of over $90 billion. When the share price if Amazon increased by more than 2.5%, his wealth surpassed over $100 billion on 24th November 2017.
Eventually, on 6th March 2018, he was formally designated as the world wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $112 billion as per Forbes. As of 21st March 2018, Jeff has an estimated net worth of $130.8 billion and become the wealthiest person in contemporary history.
Tags