Jeff Bezos

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. …

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). …

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. …

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 $1.95×10 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 $1.14×10 in 2025), a 40.5% drop. His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion (equivalent to $3.6×10 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 $2.7×10 in 2025). The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion (equivalent to $4.4×10 in 2025). From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion (equivalent to $1.43×10 in 2025). After the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion (equivalent to $1.02×10 in 2025)—a 17.7% drop. His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion (equivalent to $1.86×10 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 $4.15×10 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 $6.83×10 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 $9.0×10 in 2025). By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion (equivalent to $6.06×10 in 2025). However, just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion (equivalent to $2.17×10 in 2025) to $66.5 billion (equivalent to $8.92×10 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. …

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.

Bezos portrayed a Starfleet official in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond, and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening. He had lobbied Paramount for the role apropos of Alexa and his personal/professional interest in speech recognition. His one line consisted of a response to an alien in distress: "Speak Normally." In his initial discussion of the project which became Alexa with his technical advisor Greg Hart in 2011, Bezos told him that the goal was to create "the Star Trek computer." Bezos's family corporation Zefram LLC is named after Zefram Cochrane, a character from Star Trek.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie released a joint statement which revealed that they would be getting divorced after 25 years together. Subsequently, National Enquirer revealed that Bezos had an affair with media personality Lauren Sánchez; the affair with Sánchez had lasted for months. Later, Bezos published an online essay on February 7, 2019, in which he accused American Media, Inc. owner David Pecker of "extortion and blackmail" for threatening to publish intimate photos of Bezos and current girlfriend Lauren Sánchez if he did not stop his investigation into how his text messages and other photos had been leaked to the National Enquirer. …