Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964, as Jeff Jorgensen) is an American entrepreneur who founded Amazon, the planet's biggest online store and cloud-computing firm. He also serves as its executive chairman and was its CEO and president until mid-2021. From 2017 through 2021, both Bloomberg and Forbes ranked him as the world's richest person; by 2026, his fortune sat around $284 billion.

Bezos grew up in Houston and Miami after being born in Albuquerque. He earned an engineering degree from Princeton in 1986, then spent eight years on Wall Street working in finance and tech. In mid-1994, he drove from New York City to Seattle and launched Amazon as an online bookstore. It later grew into a giant selling everything from streaming media to artificial intelligence services, and its Amazon Web Services division leads the market for cloud infrastructure and virtual assistants.

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a company that builds rockets and offers suborbital space flights. He flew to space on its New Shepard rocket in 2021. He bought *The Washington Post* in 2013 and runs other investments through his venture firm, Bezos Expeditions. In July 2018, his net worth hit $150 billion, making him the first centibillionaire on Forbes’ real-time list and the richest person in modern history at that time. He stepped down as Amazon’s CEO on July 5, 2021, handing the role to Andy Jassy, and became executive chairman.

Bezos was born Jeff Jorgensen in Albuquerque to Jacklyn Gise, a 17-year-old high school student, and Ted Jorgensen, a 19-year-old Danish American unicyclist. His parents divorced when he was 17 months old; his mother later married Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos, who adopted Jeff in 1968 and changed his surname. The family moved to Houston, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon, and Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary. Summers were spent on his maternal grandfather’s ranch in Texas, which Jeff later bought and expanded from 25,000 to 160,000 acres. As a child, he rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room.

The family relocated to Miami, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School and worked as a short-order cook at McDonald’s. He was valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. In his graduation speech, he talked about moving heavy industry and people into space while keeping Earth as “a huge national park.” He then studied at Princeton, switching from physics to electrical engineering and computer science. He later said a classmate’s superior math skills made him abandon dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist. He was president of Princeton’s SEDS chapter, had a 4.2 GPA, and graduated summa cum laude in 1986.

After college, Bezos turned down offers from Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting. He first worked at Fitel, a fintech startup, rising to head of development and director of customer service. He then spent two years as a product manager at Bankers Trust, followed by four years at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., where he became its fourth senior vice president at age 30.

In spring 1994, Bezos learned web usage was growing 2,300% a year and decided to start an online bookstore. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, quit their jobs and founded Amazon.