Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( BAY-zohss; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman, and the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes, he was the world's wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, and in 2026, his net worth was approximately US$284 billion.

Bezos was born in Albuquerque, and raised in Houston and Miami. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in engineering. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.

Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000, and he flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021. He purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions.

The first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index, Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018 (equivalent to $190,000,000,000 in 2025). On July 5, 2021, Bezos took over the role of executive chairman and stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon, succeeded by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn (née Gise; 1946–2025) and Ted Jorgensen (1944–2015). At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19. Ted was a Danish American unicyclist born in Chicago to a family of Baptists. After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school, bringing her baby with her. Jeff attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was two.

Ted struggled with alcohol and with his finances. Jacklyn left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was 17 months old. After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted 4-year-old Jeff, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos. Jacklyn, her husband, and her son left the area and asked Ted to discontinue contact, to which he agreed.

After Mike received his degree from the University of New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon. Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Jeff's maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.

Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where his grandson would spend many summers in his youth and which he would later purchase and expand from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 160,000 acres (64,750 ha). Jeff displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School. In high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.

Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. In his graduation speech, Bezos spoke about the possibility of human space colonization. A local newspaper quoted him as saying that he hoped humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space while preserving Earth as "a huge national park".

After Bezos graduated from college in 1986, he was offered positions at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a financial technology telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990. From 1990 to 1994, he worked at D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modeling. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice president by age 30.

In spring 1994, Bezos read that web usage was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year and eventually decided to establish an online bookstore. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, left their jobs at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. Bezos led the company's early development while MacKenzie Scott handled bookkeeping, financial administration, and some of Amazon's early freight negotiations during its startup phase. Before choosing Seattle as Amazon's headquarters, Bezos reportedly explored locating the company on a Native American reservation near San Francisco, partly because of potential tax advantages.

Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet. At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with "A" would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches. In addition, he regarded "Amazon," the name of the world's largest river, as fitting for what he hoped would become the world's largest online bookstore. He accepted an estimated $300,000 (equivalent to $700,000 in 2025) from his parents as an investment in Amazon. He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt. Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products. Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering (IPO). In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.

In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company's product offerings to include a variety of other consumer goods. Bezos used funds raised during the company's 1997 equity offering (equivalent to $110,000,000 in 2025) to finance the acquisition of smaller internet companies during the dot-com expansion period. Among these acquisitions were a purchase of a majority stake in Pets.com in 1999 and a purchase of a portion of Kozmo.com for $60 million (equivalent to $120,000,000 in 2025), both of which failed after the dot-com bubble collapse in 2000. By the end of 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks (equivalent to $3,700,000,000 in 2025), as Amazon's cash balances dipped to only $350 million (equivalent to $650,000,000 in 2025). However, the company continued to expand despite its losses, and in 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic. Revenues stagnated later that year, and after the company nearly went bankrupt, Bezos closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce. In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $35 million (equivalent to $61,000,000 in 2025).

In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle. According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos wished to create a device that allowed a "flow state" in reading similar to the experience of video games. In 2013, Bezos secured a $600-million contract (equivalent to $830,000,000 in 2025) with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services. In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.

Journalist Nellie Bowles of The New York Times has described the public persona and personality of Bezos as that of "a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan". During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare. Journalist Mark O'Connell criticized Bezos's relentless customer focus as "very small" in terms of impact on humanity as a whole, a sentiment technologist Tim O'Reilly agreed with. His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon. Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy.

Bezos was seen by some as needlessly quantitative and data-driven. This perception was detailed by Alan Deutschman, who described him as "talking in lists" and "[enumerating] the criteria, in order of importance, for every decision he has made". Select accounts of his persona have drawn controversy and public attention. Notably, journalist Brad Stone wrote a book that described Bezos as a demanding boss as well as hyper-competitive, and opined that Bezos perhaps "bet the biggest on the Internet" out of anyone. Bezos has been characterized as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.

During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for aggressive business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money. His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company. Since 2017, he has been portrayed by Kyle Mooney and Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live, usually as an undercutting, domineering figure. His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parodied as an enterprising supervillain.

In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation named Bezos the "World's Worst Boss", with its general secretary Sharan Burrow saying: "Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model", while in 2019, Harvard Business Review, which ranked Bezos the best-performing CEO for 4 years in a row since 2014, did not rank him even in the top 100, citing Amazon's "relatively low ESG (environment, social, and governance) scores" that reflect "risks created by working conditions and employment policies, data security, and antitrust issues".

During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business-related expenses. His relative lack of philanthropy compared to other billionaires has drawn a negative response from the public since 2016. Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a New York Times piece.

In 1999, Bezos received his first major award when Time named him Person of the Year.

In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders.

Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle.

In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune.

Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997 after raising $54 million (equivalent to $110,000,000 in 2025) through Amazon's initial public offering (IPO). He was first included on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in 1999 with an estimated net worth of $10.1 billion (equivalent to $19,500,000,000 in 2025), which placed his on the 19th position in the world and 10th in the USA. His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later (equivalent to $11,400,000,000 in 2025), a 40.5% drop. His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion (equivalent to $3,600,000,000 in 2025). He lost $500 million the following year (equivalent to $900,000,000 in 2025), which brought his net worth down to $1.5 billion (equivalent to $2,700,000,000 in 2025). The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion (equivalent to $4,400,000,000 in 2025). From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion (equivalent to $14,300,000,000 in 2025). After the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion (equivalent to $10,200,000,000 in 2025)—a 17.7% drop. His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion (equivalent to $18,600,000,000 in 2025). This percentage increase ascended him to the 43rd spot on the ranking from 68th.

After a rumor broke out that Amazon was developing a smartphone, Bezos's net worth rose to $30.5 billion in 2014 (equivalent to $41,500,000,000 in 2025). A year later, he entered the top ten when he increased his net worth to a total of $50.3 billion (equivalent to $68,300,000,000 in 2025). Bezos rose to become the fifth richest person in the world hours before market close; he gained $7 billion in one hour (equivalent to $9,000,000,000 in 2025). By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion (equivalent to $60,600,000,000 in 2025). However, just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion (equivalent to $21,700,000,000 in 2025) to $66.5 billion (equivalent to $89,200,000,000 in 2025), unofficially ranking him the third-richest person in the world, behind Warren Buffett. After sporadic jumps in Amazon's share price, in July 2017 he briefly unseated Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world.

Bezos would continue to sporadically surpass Gates throughout the month of October 2017 after Amazon's share price fluctuated. His net worth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017 (equivalent to $131,000,000,000 in 2025), after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%. When the 2017 list was issued, Bezos's net worth was registered at $72.8 billion (equivalent to $95,620,418,137 in 2025), adding $27.6 billion from the previous year (equivalent to $36,000,000,000 in 2025). His wealth's rapid growth from 2016 to 2017 sparked a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a controlled, reduced time scale. On October 10, 2017, he made an estimated $6.24 billion (equivalent to $8,200,000,000 in 2025) in 5 minutes, slightly less than the then annual gross domestic product of Kyrgyzstan.

On March 6, 2018, Bezos was designated the wealthiest person in the world, with a registered net worth of $112 billion (equivalent to $144,000,000,000 in 2025). He unseated Bill Gates ($90 billion, equivalent to $115,000,000,000 in 2025), who was $6 billion (equivalent to $7,700,000,000 in 2025) ahead of Warren Buffett ($84 billion, equivalent to $108,000,000,000 in 2025), ranked third. He is considered the first registered centi-billionaire (not adjusted for inflation).

Bezos's net worth increased by $33.6 billion (equivalent to $44,000,000,000 in 2025) from January 2017 to January 2018. Following a report by Quartz highlighting Bezos' wealth, Amazon workers in Poland, Germany, and Spain participated in demonstrations and labor strikes draw attention to his growing wealth and the lack of compensation, labor rights, and satisfactory working conditions of select Amazon workers. On July 17, 2018, he was designated the "wealthiest person in modern history" by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

In 1992, while working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan, Bezos met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later. In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie are the parents of four children: three sons, and a daughter adopted from China.

In March 2003, Bezos was a passenger in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas while surveying land to buy for Blue Origin; the other three occupants in the helicopter were pilot Charles "Cheater" Bella, Amazon lawyer Elizabeth Korrell, and local rancher Ty Holland. All survived; Bezos sustained only minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.

According to public campaign finance records, Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S. senators from Washington. He has also supported Democrats U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham, U.S. senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues. Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, and in 2012 contributed $2.5 million (equivalent to $3,500,000 in 2025) to Washington United for Marriage, a group supporting a yes vote on Washington Referendum 74, which affirmed a same-sex marriage law enacted in the state. Bezos donated $100,000 (equivalent to $150,000 in 2025) towards a movement against a Washington state income tax in 2010 for "top earners". In 2012, he donated to Amazon's political action committee (PAC), which has given $56,000 (equivalent to $79,000 in 2025) and $74,500 (equivalent to $104,000 in 2025) to Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

In 2014, Amazon won a bid for a cloud computing contract with the CIA valued at $600 million (equivalent to $800,000,000 in 2025). A 2018, $10 billion contract (equivalent to $12,800,000,000 in 2025) known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, this time with the Pentagon, was allegedly written up in a way that favors Amazon. Controversy over this was raised when General James Mattis accepted a headquarters tour invitation from Bezos and coordinated the deal through Sally Donnelly, a lobbyist who previously worked for Amazon. In November 2019, when the contract was awarded to Microsoft instead, Amazon filed a lawsuit with allegations that the bidding process was biased. On July 6, 2021, the Pentagon cancelled the JEDI contract with Microsoft, citing that "due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs." Despite Bezos's support for an open borders policy towards immigrants, Amazon has actively marketed facial recognition software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In 2019, a PAC linked to Bezos spent over $1 million (equivalent to $1,300,000 in 2025) in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the reelection bid of Seattle city council member and activist Kshama Sawant. On November 22, 2021, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million (equivalent to $119,000,000 in 2025) to the Obama Foundation to "help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders" and requested the Obama Presidential Center's plaza to be named after John Lewis.

After the 2016 presidential election, Bezos was invited to join Donald Trump's Defense Innovation Advisory Board, an advisory council to improve the technology used by the Defense Department. Trump has repeatedly criticized Bezos via Twitter, accused Bezos of avoiding corporate taxes, gaining undue political influence, and undermining his presidency by spreading fake news. Nevertheless, Bezos congratulated Trump on his second election victory, posting on X, "Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love."

Since 2023, Bezos has been a resident of Indian Creek, Florida. As reported by Axios in February 2025, Bezos held a private phone conversation in July 2024 with then-candidate Trump, planting the seeds of a "Bezos–Trump alliance" months before Bezos blocked the Washington Post's editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the election. After Trump's November victory, Bezos dined with Elon Musk and Trump at Mar-a-Lago; Amazon subsequently donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration, at which Bezos was in attendance. Bezos and Trump were reported to have met for dinner again in February 2025, on the same night that Bezos announced changes to the Washington Post's opinion policies to promote "free markets and personal liberties" and suppress divergent opinions. Axios characterized it as "another sign of Trump and Bezos' growing closeness".