Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ; born Jorgensen ; 12 January 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, best known as the founder, , and chief executive officer of Amazon, the world's largest online retailer.
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in various related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He founded Amazon in late 1994 on a cross-country journey from New York City to Seattle. The company started out as an online bookstore and has grown to a variety of products and services, including streaming video and audio. It is currently the world's largest online Internet sales company, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure through its Amazon Web Services arm.
Bezos added to his business interests when he founded the Blue Origin aerospace company in 2000. Blue Origin's test flight made it first to reach space by 2015 and Blue has plans to commence commercial suborbital human space as early as 2018. He bought The Washington Post in 2013 for US $ 250 million in cash. Bezos manages other business investments through venture capital funds, Bezos Expeditions.
On July 27, 2017, he became the richest man in the world when his net worth is estimated to increase to over $ 90 billion. His fortune surpassed $ 100 billion for the first time on Nov. 24 after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%. On March 6, 2018, Forbes officially designated Bezos the world's richest man with a net worth of $ 112 billion, making him the first billionaire on the wealth index.
Video Jeff Bezos
Early life and education
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and father Ted Jorgensen, owner of a bike shop and original Chicago. At the time of the birth of his son, Jacklyn was a seventeen-year-old high school student. After Jacklyn divorced Ted, he married Miguel "Mike" Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike Bezos adopted a four-year-old Jorgensen, whose family name was later changed to Bezos. The family moved to Houston, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he received a degree from the University of New Mexico. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from the fourth to the sixth grade.
Bezos is the grandson of Lawrence Preston Gise, regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque. Gise retired early to his family farm near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend much of his summer in his youth. Bezos will then buy this farm, and grow it from 25,000 hectares (101a, km 2 or 39 mil 2 ) to 300,000 acres (1,214 km 2 or 468 miles 2 ). Her maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (nÃÆ' Â © e Strait), through whom she was a country cousin of George Strait.
Bezos often exhibits scientific interest and technological proficiency; he once installed an electric alarm to keep his siblings out of his room. Her family moved to Miami, Florida, where she attended Miami Palmetto High School. When Bezos was in high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short line chef during breakfast hours. He attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida where he received the Silver Knight Award in 1982. He was a high school farewell and National Graduate School of Virtue. In 1986, he graduated from Princeton University with an average grade of 4.2 and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. While at Princeton, he was also elected to Tau Beta Pi and is president of the Princeton Student chapter for Space Exploration and Development.
Maps Jeff Bezos
Business career
Initial career
After Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1987, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a financial telecommunications company, where he was assigned to build a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service afterwards. He switched to the banking industry when he was hired months later as product manager at Bankers Trust; he worked there from 1988 to 1990. He worked at D. E. Shaw & amp; Co., a newly established hedge fund, from 1990 to 1994, where he eventually served as senior vice president at the age of 30.
Amazon
In late 1993, Bezos decided to start an online bookstore. He left his job at D.Ã, E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after writing his business plan en route from New York to Seattle. Bezos named his new company "Amazon" after the Amazon River in South America, partly because its name begins with the letter "A," which is at the beginning of the alphabet. He received about $ 300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon. He warned many early investors that there is a 70% chance that Amazon will fail or go bust. Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos always plans to expand into other products. Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he moved into public with an initial public offering (IPO). Responding to important reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos argued that the growth of the Internet would take over the market competition from major book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & amp; Noble.
In 1998, Bezos advocated diversification of the company when he started selling music and video online; at the end of the year, it also expands the company's products to include various consumer goods. Bezos used $ 54 million collected during a company's equity offer to finance an aggressive acquisition of a smaller or competing company. In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which collects data from weather channels and website traffic. During late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused financial hardship after income stagnated. Bezos borrowed $ 2 billion from certain banks with only $ 350 million in ownership. After the company almost went bankrupt, it closed the distribution center and laid off 14% of Amazon's workforce. In 2003, Amazon recovered from financial instability and made a profit of $ 400 million. In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle. According to the Time 2008 profile, Bezos wants to create the same stream conditions found in the video game simulation in the book; he hopes the readers are fully involved with the books. In 2013, Bezos earned a $ 600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services. In October of that year, Amazon was named the world's largest online retailer.
On Saturday, August 15, 2015, the New York Times published an article describing Amazon's business practices. Bezos responded to his employee with a Sunday memo, in which he denied the article's conclusion that the company was emotionally poor workplace. Bezos says that anyone who believes that the story is true should contact him directly. In May 2016, Bezos sold a little over a million shares in the company for $ 671 million, making it the largest amount of money he ever raised in selling his Amazon holdings.
On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold one million more shares for $ 756.7 million. A year later, Bezos took 130,000 new employees when he started a massive recruitment at the company's distribution center. On January 19, 2018, its holdings in Amazon shares were priced at a little over $ 109 billion; months later he started selling stocks to raise cash for other companies, in particular, Blue Origin. On January 29, 2018, he was featured in the Amazon Super Bowl ad. On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported the highest profit with a quarterly profit of $ 2 billion. Due to Alibaba's proliferation in China, Bezos continues to express interest in expanding the Amazon across India.
In March 2018, Bezos sent Amit Agarwal, the Amazonian point man, to the country, with $ 5.5 billion to localize operations across their supply chain routes. Later in the month, US President Donald Trump accused Amazon-and Bezos in particular-sales tax evasion, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices. Amazon's stock price fell by 9% in response to the president's negative comments; this reduces Bezos' personal fortune by $ 10.7 billion. A few weeks later, Bezos recovered his losses when an academic report from Stanford University showed that Trump could not do much to organize the Amazon significantly in the near-term.
Blue Origin
In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company. Bezos has long expressed interest in space travel and the development of human life in the solar system. She was a farewell giver when she graduated from high school in 1982. Her speech was followed up with a Miami Herald interview where she expressed interest in building and developing hotels, amusement parks and colonies for humans. who are in orbit. Bezos, 18, stated that he wanted to preserve the Earth from excessive use through resource depletion.
After its founding, Blue Origin maintained its low profile until 2006, while purchasing vast lands in West Texas for launch and test facilities. After the company gained public attention during the 2000s, Bezos also showed interest in reducing the cost of space travel for humans while also improving the safety of travel beyond the earth. In September 2011, one of the company's unmanned prototype vehicles crashed during a short test flight. Although the accident was seen as a setback, news outlets have noted the extent to which the company is stepping from its stand in advancing the spacecraft. In May 2013, Bezos met with Richard Branson, chair of Virgin Galactic, in 2013 to discuss commercial space opportunities and strategies. He has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk since the three are the billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.
By 2015, Bezos announced that a new orbital launch vehicle is under development and will make its first flight in late 2010s. Then in November, the Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft managed to slide into space and reach a planned test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before making a vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas. In 2016, Bezos allowed reporters to choose to visit, tour, and photograph the facilities. He has repeatedly called for increased space energy and industrial manufacturing to reduce the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.
In December 2017, New Shepard successfully flew and landed the puppet passengers, changing and pushing the start date of humanity travel into late 2018. To run this program, Blue Origin builds six of its vehicles to support all testing phases and operation: passenger flight test, flight with test passenger, and commercial-passenger weekly operation. Since 2016, Bezos has spoken more freely about his hopes of colonizing the solar system, and has sold $ 1 billion in Amazon stock every year to exploit Blue Origin in an effort to support this effort. In May 2018, Bezos argued that Blue Origin's main goal was to preserve Earth's natural resources by making multi-planet human species. He announced that New Shepard would begin transporting humans into sub-orbital space in November 2018.
The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced its $ 250 million purchase of The Washington Post for $ 250 million in cash. To carry out the sale, he founded Nash Holdings, a limited shareholder company that legally owns the paper. The sale closes on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings takes over the reins. In March 2014, Bezos made his first significant change on The Washington Post and raised paywall online to customers of a number of local US newspapers in Texas, Hawaii and Minnesota. In January 2016, Bezos aims to reinvent newspapers as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms and analytics software. Throughout the early years of possession, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the newspaper. Bezos and the newspaper editorial board have dismissed allegations that he unfairly controls newspaper content and Bezos maintains the newspaper's independence. After a spike in the number of online readers by 2016, this paper is profitable for the first time since Bezos made a purchase in 2013.
Bezos Expedition
Bezos makes personal investments through venture capital vehicles, Bezos Expeditions . He was one of the first shareholders on Google, when he invested $ 250,000 in 1998. The $ 250,000 investment generated Google's 3.3 million shares, worth about $ 3.1 billion by 2017. He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a a life-extension research company hoping to slow or stop the aging process. Bezos is involved in the health sector, which includes investments in Biotechnology Unity, Grail, Juno Therapeutics, and ZocDoc. In January 2018, an announcement was made about Bezos's role in an unnamed health care company. This effort is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway.
Public image
Journalist Nellie Bowles of The New York Times has portrayed Bezos's public personality and personality as "a brilliant but mysterious and cold-blooded corporate titan." During the 1990s, Bezos gained a reputation for continuing to push the Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare. His business practice projects a public image of caution and simplicity with his own wealth and Amazon's wealth. Bezos was a multi-billionaire who hung his clothes on a shelf at his headquarters in the Amazon and drove the Honda Accord in 1996. Throughout the early 2000s, he was considered geeky or nerdy, often dressed in unsuitable clothes and making various social errors.
Bezos is seen by the public as quantitative and data-driven without the need. This perception is spelled out by Alan Deutschman who describes it as "speaking in lists" and "[enumerating] criteria, in order of importance, for every decision he makes." Selecting a person's account has attracted controversy and public attention. In particular, journalist Brad Stone wrote an unauthorized book describing Bezos as a demanding and hyper-competitive boss. Studies involving former employees of Amazon have noted the interaction with Bezos as Darwin's nature but praised the dynamics of maintaining a well-run company. Bezos has been stereotyped as a well-known opportunistic CEO who operates with little attention to obstacles and externalities. This depiction has been challenged by Bezos himself, his wife, Amazon employees, and the community as a mischaracterization.
During early 2010, Bezos established his reputation for imperialistic business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started wearing customized clothes; he exercises weight, runs a strict diet and starts free to spend his money. His physical transformation has been compared with the Amazon transformation; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company. His physical appearance enhances public perception of himself as a dominant symbolic figure in business and in popular culture, where he has been parodied as a super-active villain. Bezos eats exotic food, such as breakfast octopus and roasted iguana. During late 2010, Bezos reversed his reputation for reluctantly spending money on business-related expenses. Personal liberal spending and lack of philanthropy have attracted negative responses from the public since 2016.
Leadership style
Bezos uses what he calls "the framework of regrets" while he works in D. E, E. Shaw and again during the early years of the Amazon. He described the philosophy of life by stating: "When I am 80 years old, I will regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret the early loss of the Internet? During the 1990s and early 2000s on Amazon, it was characterized as trying to measure all aspects of running a company, frequently enrolling employees in spreadsheets and basing executive decisions on data. To push forward Amazon, Bezos developed the "Get Big Fast" spell, which speaks to the company's needs for its scale of operation and builds market dominance. He would rather divert Amazon's profits back to the company instead of allocating them among shareholders in dividends.
Bezos uses the term "harmony of working life" rather than a more standard work-life balance because he believes balance implies that you can have one and not the other. He believes that work and home life are interconnected, informing and calibrating each other. Journalist Walt Mossberg dubbed the idea that someone who can not tolerate criticism or criticism should not do anything new or exciting, "The Bezos Principle". Bezos does not schedule morning meetings and impose two pizza rules - the preference for meetings is small enough that two pizzas can feed everyone in the boardroom. He meets with Amazon investors for a total of just six hours a year. Instead of using PowerPoint, Bezos requires high-level employees to present information with a six-page narrative. Beginning in 1998, Bezos publishes an annual letter to Amazon shareholders where it often refers to five principles: focusing on noncompetitors, taking risks for market leadership, facilitating staff morale, building corporate culture, and empowering people. Bezos maintains the email address "jeff@amazon.com" as an outlet for customers to reach him and the company. Although he did not respond to emails, he forwarded some of them with question marks in the subject line to executives who tried to resolve the issue. Bezos has quoted Warren Buffet (from Berkshire Hathaway), Jamie Dimon (from JPMorgan Chase), and Bob Iger (from Walt Disney) as a major influence on his leadership style.
Recognition
In 1999, Bezos received his first major award when Time gave him the name Person of the Year. In 2008, he was chosen by US. News & amp; 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 Amazon Kindle. In 2012, Bezos was named Best Business of the Year by Fortune . He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attends the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Petersburg. Moritz, Switzerland and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He is a member of the Executive Board's Executive Committee for 2011 and 2012. In 2014, he was ranked as the world's best performing CEO by the Harvard Business Review .
He also found in Fortune's 50 great world leaders for three consecutive years, topping the list by 2015. In September 2016, Bezos received a $ 250,000 prize to win Heinlein Prize for Advances in the Commercial Space, which he contributes to the Student for Space Exploration and Development. In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial path for human space flight." In March 2018, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin. He received the 2018 Axel Springer Germany 2018 Award for Business Innovation and Social Responsibility. Time magazine named it one of the 100 most influential people in the world on their 2018 list.
Wealth
Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997 after collecting $ 54 million through Amazon's initial public offering (IPO). He was first included in The World's Billionaires list of Forbes in 1999 with a registered net worth of $ 10.1 billion. Its net worth fell to $ 6.1 billion a year later, down 40.5%. His wealth declined even more in the following year, down 66.6% to $ 2.0 billion. He lost $ 500 million the following year, bringing his net worth down to $ 1.5 billion. The following year, his net worth increased 104% to $ 2.5 billion. From 2005 to 2007, he doubled his net worth to $ 8.7 billion. After the financial crisis and a successful economic recession, its net worth will erode $ 6.8 billion - a 17.7% decline. His fortune rose 85.2% in 2010, leaving it with $ 12.6 billion. This percentage increase went up to 43rd place in rank from 68th.
After rumors that Amazon developed smartphones, Bezos's net worth rose to $ 30.5 billion by 2014. A year later, Bezos entered the top ten when he raised his net worth to a total of $ 50.3 billion. Bezos rose to become the 5th richest person in the world hours before the market closed; he gets $ 7 billion in one hour. When the Forbes list is calculated in March 2016, its net worth is registered at $ 45.2 billion. However, just months later in October 2016, his fortune increased by $ 16.2 billion to $ 66.5 billion unofficially ranking the world's third richest man behind Warren Buffett. After a sporadic jump in Amazon share prices, in July 2017, he briefly shifted Microsoft founder Bill Gates as the richest man in the world.
Bezos will continue sporadically beyond Gates throughout October 2017 after Amazon's stock prices fluctuate. His net worth exceeded $ 100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%. When the 2017 list was published, Bezos's net worth was listed at $ 72.8 billion, adding $ 27.6 billion from a year earlier. Bezos is officially ranked as the third richest man in the world up from 5th place in 2016. Its rapid growth of wealth from 2016 to 2017 triggers various judgments about how much money Bezos generates on a controlled and reduced time scale. On October 10, 2017, he made about $ 6.24 billion in 5 minutes, slightly less than all of Kyrgyzstan's economic output.
On March 6, 2018, Bezos was officially designated as the richest man in the world with a registered net worth of $ 112 billion. He thwarted Bill Gates ($ 90 billion) that was $ 6 billion in front of Warren Buffett ($ 84 billion), ranked third. He is considered the first registered billionaires (not adjusted for inflation).
His wealth, in 2017-18, is equivalent to 2.7 million Americans. Bezos net worth increased by $ 33.6 billion from January 2017 to January 2018. This increase surpassed economic development (in terms of GDP) of more than 96 countries worldwide. During March 9, Bezos earns $ 230,000 every 60 seconds. The Motley Fool estimates that if Bezos did not sell its shares from its initial public offering in 1997, its net worth would sit at $ 181 billion by 2018.
Personal life
In 1992, Bezos worked for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan when he met the novelist MacKenzie Tuttle. MacKenzie is a research associate at the company and they married a year later. In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. He and his wife are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.
In March 2003, Bezos was one of three passengers in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas after the tail blast struck the tree. Bezos suffered minor injuries and was discharged from the local hospital on the same day.
In 2016, Bezos plays the official Starfleet in the Star Trek Beyond movie, and joins cast and crew at San Diego Comic-Con screening.
Politics
According to the financial records of the public campaign, Bezos supports the election campaign of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two US Democratic Senators from Washington. He has also supported US representatives John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Spencer Abraham, US Senators who serve on committees dealing with Internet related issues. He is a supporter of the LGBTQ movement and supports the legalization of same-sex marriage. Bezos donated $ 100,000 for a move against the higher state income tax of Washington in 2010. In 2012, he donated to the Amazon political action committee (PAC), which has given $ 56,000 and $ 74,500 to Democrats and Republicans, respectively.
After the 2016 presidential election, Bezos was invited to join Defense Innovation Council of Donald Trump, the advisory board to improve the technology used by the Department of Defense. Bezos declined the offer without further comment. Trump has alluded to a potential conflict of interest between Bezos business interests. He accused Bezos of avoiding corporate taxes, obtaining undue political influence, and damaging his presidency by spreading false news. Bezos has repeatedly joked about using his rocket company to send Donald Trump into space.
In March 2018, Bezos met in Seattle with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.
Philanthropy
Bezos supports his philanthropic efforts through direct donations, a nonprofit project funded by the Bezos Expedition, and other charitable organizations. Through Bezos Expedition, he has financed the Bezos Center for Innovation at the $ 10 million Seattle Museum and History Museum and the Beehive Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at the $ 15 million Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He personally donated $ 10 million in 2009 and $ 20 million in 2010 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He also donated $ 800,000 to Worldreader, a non-profit organization, founded by former Amazon employees.
In 2015, he funded the recovery of two first-phase Rocketdyne F-1 Saturn V engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. They are positively identified as part of the Apollo 11 S-1C mission in July 2013. The machine is currently on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.
On June 15, 2017, he sent a message on Twitter asking for an idea for philanthropy: "I think about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I spend most of my time - working in the long run". On May 23, 2017, he gave $ 1 million to the Journalist Committee for Press Freedom, the single largest prize received by the organization. The committee provides pro bono legal services to protect the rights of American journalists.
In January 2018, he donated $ 33 million to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for illegal immigrants brought to the United States while they were under age.
See also
- List of Princeton University alumni
- List People Time of the Year recipients
Note
References
Source
- Robinson, Tom (2010). Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com Architect . ABDO publishing. ISBN: 9781604537598.
Further reading
External links
- Jeff Bezos at TED
- Appearance in C-SPAN
- Jeff Bezos at Charlie Rose
- Works by or about Jeff Bezos in the library (WorldCat catalog)
- "Jeff Bezos collects news and comments". The New York Times .
- Bezos Expedition
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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