Jeff Bezos: Story of The Retailing Giant

Who doesn’t likes shopping, but to go out to a store for a handful of things is very cliché. Online shopping/e-commerce is the new trend that people are really benefiting from. Consumers can find the products of their interest by visiting the website of the retailer with just a few clicks directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine. An online store evokes the physical analogy of purchasing products or services regularly. One of the largest online retailing companies is Amazon, founded by Mr. Jeff Bezos.

Jeff is an American businessman, founder, and executive chairman of Amazon. Jeff Bezos is a person who has brought new reforms to the e-commerce business. He has diversified the e-commerce business into many segments with a listing of around 20 million products. He is also a big enthusiast of aerospace services, thus founded his own aerospace manufacturing company Blue Origin.

Jeff Bezos – Biography
Jeff Bezos – Personal Life
Jeff Bezos – Career
Jeff Bezos – Amazon
Jeff Bezos – Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos – Net Worth
Jeff Bezos – Philanthropy
Jeff Bezos – Awards & Recognition

Jeff Bezos – Biography

Jeff Bezos – Personal Life

Jeff Bezoss’ aka Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in New Mexico. His parents Theodore Jorgensen and Jacklyn Jorgensen were college students when they got married and completed their classes on the night shift while bringing baby Jeff along. After they got divorced, his mother married a Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos, who adopted Jeff when he was 4 years old and changed his name from Jorgensen to Bezos. Bezos was brought up in Miami and completed his schooling in the Miami Palmetto Senior High School. Jeff worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift, when he was in high school.

Jeff graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. After Bezos completed college, he started working for Filtel, a telecommunication company tasked with building a network for international trade. There in 1992, he met MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a novelist and the two fell in love, and got married the next year. They both moved to Seattle in 1994 where Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.

Jeff Bezos – Career

In the early stage after graduation, Bezos was offered jobs from Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting. Bezos started his career working with Fitel, a company that built networks for international trade. During that period, he was promoted to head of development and director of customer service. Jeff became a product manager at Bankers Trust, and that is when he switched into the banking business. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. During the mid-1990 he shifted to D.E. Shaw & Co. a hedge fund dealing with mathematical modelling. He worked there till 1994, in the duration he was the fourth senior vice president of the company. On 5th July 1994, a phenomenon struck in Bezos garage and he created Amazon. Bezos called his new firm Cadabra at first but subsequently changed it to Amazon in honor of the Amazon River in South America. His passion for aviation and aerospace crafts never waned as Amazon's retail company grew. He explored different opportunities and by the year 2000, he started his own company Blue Origin, which is an aerospace manufacturing and suborbital spaceflight services company.

The Blue Origin-launched New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and also landed successfully back on the Earth. Bezos also bought The Washington Post, the major American newspaper, in 2013 for $250 million. He also owns a venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions, through which it manages many other investments. Bezos co-founded biotechnology company Altos Labs with Yuri Milner, the founder of Mail.ru, in September 2021.

Jeff Bezos – Amazon

Amazon was established as an online bookstore. He started Amazon with an initial investment of $300,000 which he took from his parents. Although Amazon began as an online bookshop, Bezos had always intended to extend the company's offerings to various other product categories. Three years after Bezos launched the IPO of Amazon and listed the company. After the expansion 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 products to include a variety of other consumer goods. Amazon was running well and Bezos needed funds, thus he borrowed $2 Billion from American Banks and launched Amazon Web services, which was a big failure. Huge losses were incurred at that time. Taking a rebound in 2003 from the instability Amazon turned a profit of $400 million in the financial year. After a great research Amazon launched Kindle in 2007 which was an e-book reader device that was similar to a video game device. By the year 2013, Amazon was recognized as the largest shopping retailer in the world. With this great success, Jeff was featured in the Forbes list of richest people in the world, and on 27th July 2017, Bezos became the world's wealthiest person over Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates when his estimated net worth increased to just over $90 billion. On November 24, 2017, his net worth topped $100 billion for the first time, and on March 6, 2018, Forbes named him the world's wealthiest person, with a net worth of $112 billion. Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, after exactly 27 years of founding it. His net worth is currently estimated at $150.1 bn, as of April 2022.

How to Register for Amazon India’s Machine Learning Summer School Programme?

Amazon India has launched a Virtual Machine Learning Summer school programme. Here’s how you can register for it.

StartupTalkyAlan Joseph

Jeff Bezos – Blue Origin

In 2000, Bezos founded the company Blue Origin, a human space flight startup. Bezos always had an interest in space travel and development on other planets for the livelihood of the human race. Blue Origin had a quiet profile after its creation until 2006 when it bought a huge plot of land in West Texas for a launch and test site. Following the company's rise to prominence in the late 2000s, Bezos expressed an interest in lowering the expense of human space flight while simultaneously improving the safety of extra-terrestrial travel. During a short-hop test flight in September 2011, one of the company's unmanned prototype vehicles crashed. Despite the fact that the disaster was seen as a setback, news sources emphasized how far the business had progressed in spaceflight since its inception. Bezos has been superstitiously wearing his "lucky" Texas Cowboy boots to all rocket launches since the accident.

Bezos met with Virgin Galactic chairman Richard Branson in May 2013 to explore commercial spaceflight prospects and tactics. He has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk as all three are billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.

Jeff Bezos took a flight into space on his own rocket made by Blue Origin on July 20, 2021, thereby becoming the second billionaire to fly into space in the same month. The crew of his spaceflight also included his brother. Blue origin has also focused on starting a suborbital tourism business in the future.

Jeff Bezos – Net Worth

Bezos was one of the youngest billionaires of America. He became a millionaire in 1997 when he launched the first IPO of his company Amazon which gave a revenue of $54 million. He was first included in the Forbes World’s billionaires list in 1999 with a net worth of $10.1 billion. After the economic recession, his wealth decreased by 17.7%. By 2010, he had risen from 68th place to 43rd place thanks to the % improvement. After the great success of Amazon and boom in the market, Bezos in 2015, rose to be the 5th richest person in the world. After some increases in Amazon's stock price, he surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the world's wealthiest person in July 2017. At present (April 2022), Jeff Bezos is the third richest man in the world with a total wealth of $150.1 bn. He was dropped to the second position in 2021 when Elon Musk became the richest man, and eventually dropped another ranking.

Jeff Bezos – Philanthropy

Bezos being a successful businessman, is a great philanthropist too. He has donated much of his income to the needful people of America. Bezos and his family first donated $15 million to his alma mater, Princeton University. He then pledged $35 million to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Then in 2013, he pledged $500,000 to World reader, a non-profit founded by a former Amazon employee. Bezos in 2017, gave $ 1 million to the press community, and a year later he tweeted that he will donate $2 billion to a fund deal to the American homeless to establish non-profit schools.

In September 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Bezos announced a philanthropic fund of $2 billion to carry out both the initiatives, which he called Bezos Day 1 Fund. Behind this fund will be two groups - the Day 1 Family Fund and the Day 1 Academies Fund. Jeff Bezos plans to help homeless families and create preschool education in low-income areas.

“MacKenzie and I share a belief in the potential for hard work from anyone to serve others. We all have that capacity,” Jeff Bezos wrote on Twitter.

The world’s richest man then, with an estimated wealth of over $150 billion, Jeff Bezos planned to create a network of non-profit preschools for students who belong to low-income communities. Additionally, Bezos hopes to help the existing non-profit organizations to tackle the homeless crisis by making food and shelter accessible to the homeless destitute.

The Day1 Family Fund will cater to homeless households by providing the existing organizations, performing the “needle-moving work”, with a yearly allowance. On the other hand, the Day1 Academies Fund will administer the launching and operating of a network of top-quality, Montessori-inspired preschools offering full scholarships to the student.

“We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer," wrote the tech mogul on a notice posted on his Twitter handle.

This development was unveiled after a year the Amazon founder posted on Twitter urging his 222,000 followers for suggestions on philanthropic offerings that would address urgent needs and also have a lasting impact on society. In less than six hours after his request on the networking site, there were more than 3,600 replies, suggesting contributions to affordable housing, improvement in healthcare facilities, veterans’ organizations and LGBT causes, etc.

He’s been donating billions of dollars and a study denotes that Jeff in a current situation donates approximately 25% of his income to many NGOs and centres that help the poor and the people in need. In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.

How Entrepreneurs are Helping to Fight COVID-19?

Needless to mention, Coronavirus has affected every aspect of human life. Lockdowns and social distancing particularly has had immediate effect on several banking activities. Thus, at the same time, many efforts are being made to raise funds and help startups and SMEs. Experts in the sector have gre…

StartupTalkyVarad Kitey

Jeff Bezos – Awards & Recognition

• 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.
• He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of The Business Council in 2011 and 2012.
• 2014 – 2018, he was ranked as the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.
• He has also been featured in Fortune's list of 50 great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015.
• In February 2018, Bezos was elected by the National Academy of Engineering for "leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial pathway for human space flight".
• In March 2018, at the Explorers Club annual dinner, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin.

FAQs

What is the full name of Jeff Bezos?

The full name of Jeff Bezos is Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

How old is Jeff Bezos?

He was born on 12 January 1964. He is 58 years old (2022).

How did Jeff Bezos start Amazon?

Jeff Bezos has started Amazon as an online bookstore.

How old was Jeff Bezos when he became a billionaire?

He became a billionaire in 1999 when he was 35 years old.

What is Jeff Bezos' net worth?

He has a net worth of $150.1 Billion (April 2022).