Jeff Bezos, by the name of Jeffrey Preston Bezos, is an American philanthropist, entrepreneur, and space explorer, best known as the founder of the ‘Amazon website’ and owner of ‘The Washington Post;’ an online merchant of books and later a wide variety of products.

Bezos played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as a businessman. Under his guidance, Amazon became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

Amazon also runs the Whole Foods grocery chain and provides Cloud Computing and streaming services.

Through Amazon, he had revenue of $470 billion in 2021. Jeff is the billionaire of the business planet and the world.

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”

Personal Bio

Name	Jeffrey Preston Bezos
D.O.B	January 12, 1964
Place of birth	Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S
Age	58 years
Zodiac sign	Capricorn
Height	1.71 m
Weight	154 lbs
Profession	American Entrepreneur
Marital status	Divorced
Children	4 (3 Boys and a girl)

ChildhoodLife

Jeff is the son of Jaclyn Gise Jorgensen and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. At the time of Jeff’s birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student, and his father was 19. His mother, in due course, divorced Jeff’s birth father.

When he was 4, she remarried a Cuban immigrant named Miguel (Mike) Bezos. Soon after the wedding, Miguel adopted Jeff legally and changed Jeff’s last name from Jorgenson to Bezos.

Afterwhile, the whole family shifted to Houston, where Mike started a job as an engineer for Exxon. They were also closer to his maternal grandparents, who had a cattle ranch south of San Antonio. His maternal grandmother Mattie Louise Gise was the first cousin to country singer George Strait.

Early Education to Graduation Study

Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child. While growing up in Texas, Bezos used his parents’ garage as a laboratory for his science projects.

He had spent most of his time at his grandparent’s ranch in the summer. Shortly, he also declared to start his work at the farm during his summers on a serious note. After that, he purchased that ranch and extended it from 25,000 to 300,000 acres.

The family then moved to Miami when Jeff was entering high school. While in high school, Jeff worked as a short-order cook at McDonald’s. He was a high school valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar.

In his valedictorian speech, he mentioned a dream that people of the earth would ultimately take possession of space. He started his first business during high school, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders.

Jeff enrolled at Princeton University with a plan to study physics, but his passion for computers shifted his studies. He eventually graduated summa cum laude with a 4.2 GPA, Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

Jeff Bezos’s Initial Career

After being graduated from Princeton University, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos became D.E. Shaw’s youngest vice president.

While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the developing world of e-commerce. In 1994, he gave up his job, moved to Seattle, and aimed to introduce the Internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Founder of e-Commerce Amazon Website

On July 1995, Bezos launched the Amazon website after beta testing by 300 friends on the name of the South American river.

After a few months of launching the site, a few employees began to accompany Bezos to develop software with Bezos in his garage. Finally, they expanded the maneuver into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstation.

The initial success was quite impressive. The Amazon website sold books across the United States in 45 foreign countries within 30 days, even without any press promotion. The sales reached $20,000 per week in two months; according to the startup team’s prediction, Bezos grew faster than thought.

When the Amazon website first went live in 1997, many industry observers speculated if the company could compete with traditional shops that later created their own e-commerce websites.

After two years, the startup kept up with but surpassed competitors, becoming a dominant force in e-commerce.

In 1998, Bezos continued to vary Amazon’s offerings with the sale of videos ad CDs and, later on, clothes, electronics, toys, and much more through major retail joint ventures. While many dot websites of the early ’90s went out of order, Amazon flourished, with yearly sales ranging from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

Till 2018, Jeff surpassed the annual shareholder letter; the media tycoon said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime.

By September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company to ever strike that record just a few weeks after Apple.

At the end of 2018, Amazon declared it was raising the minimum income for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has still been criticized for its working conditions and exhausting rate, with worker’s objections during Prime Day in July 2019.

Bezos Other Accomplishments

In 2006, Amazon site introduced its video-on-demand service. Primarily known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was rebranded as Amazon Instant Video.
Bezos premiered several original programs with the launch of Amazon Studios in 2013. The company hit it big in 2014 with the critically-acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle.
In 2015, the company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.
In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits.
In 2007, Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections.
Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the promotion of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company’s next-generation tablet designed to give Apple’s iPad a run for its money.
In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines that an experimental program by Amazon called “Amazon Prime Air” using drones to provide delivery services to customers. Bezos purchased The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million in 2013.
Bezos supervised one of Amazon’s few major mistakes when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014.
The first Prime Air was released in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016.
Bezos had been eyeing the food delivery market, and in 2017 Amazon announced it had acquired the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion in cash.
Apart from Amazon, Bezos established a spaceflight company Blue Origin, in 2000. Blue Origin bought a launch site in Texas soon afterward and planned to initiate a crewed suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard, in 2018 and an orbital launch vehicle, New Glenn, in 2020.

Jeff Bezos-Net Worth

Bezos is the founder, chief executive officer, president, and chairman of the board of the Amazon website. He initially surpassed Bill Gates in terms of wealth in July 2017. Bezos was considered the richest person in the world without disruption between October 2017 and January 2021. Till 2022, his net worth consists of $11.5 billion.

Jeff possesses 55 million shares of Amazon, roughly 12% of the total shares outstanding. At his peak, he owned 80 million shares of Amazon, according to the company’s latest SEC filing.

Till April 2019, divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos, he transferred 19.7 million shares to his ex-wife. The worth of the shares at the time of the transfer was $36 billion.

The settlement shortly condensed Jeff’s net worth from $150 billion to $114 billion. Jeff was also an early pre-IPO shareholder in the Google website and owns at least $1 billion in shares, now known as Alphabet Inc.

For much of the 2000s, Jeff Bezos was not even in the top 10 or 20 of the world’s wealthiest people. Amazon stock began to touch the sky in late 2014. In July 2015, Jeff’s net worth was $50 billion. His asset had twice in less than two years.

On July 27, 2017, Bezos took over Bill Gates as the richest person globally. In September 2018, Amazon’s market cap topped $1 trillion. This was before his divorce, so he still owned 80 million shares. Jeff’s net worth topped a then-all-time high of $170 billion at that assessment.

Real Estate and Assets

In 2007 Jeff and MacKenzie paid $24.5 million for a mansion on 2 prime acres in Beverly Hills, California. In 2018 they paid $12.9 million for the home next door. MacKenzie received this now-combined two-home property as part of their 2019 divorce settlement.

In August 2022, MacKenzie announced that she had donated the properties to a charity called the California Community Foundation. At the time of the donation, the combined compound was worth an estimated $55 million.

On February 12, 2020, it was revealed that Jeff Bezos had paid $255 million for two properties in Beverly Hills. The Jack L. Warner estate’s first property cost $165 million.

The estate covers 10 lush acres in the heart of Beverly Hills and features a 13,600-square-foot main house. The seller was entertainment mogul David Geffen who bought the property in 1990 for $47.5 million.

The second property Bezos was reported to have bought in February 2020 was a 120-acre vacant hilltop called Enchanted Hill.

Bezos purchased in 2018 of $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.
He holds 300,000 acres in Texas, including numerous farms.
Bezos also holds 100,000 additional acres in various parts of the country.
Three units in 25 Central Park West in Manhattan.
In 1999, Bezos acquired a $10 million 5-acre property in Medina, Washington.
In 2005, he got hold of a $50 million mansion next door to his property in Medina.

Jeff Bezos-Humanitarian Work

In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million endowment to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented settlers brought to the United States as minors. The following year, Bezos also donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates to promote emissions-free energy.
In September 2018, Bezos donated $10 million to With Honor, an unbiased organization that works to increase the number of veterans in political office.
In February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund. Later that year, in November, Bezos announced $791M of donations to established, renowned groups, with $100M each going to Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund, and the leftovers were going to 11 other groups.
In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos bestowed $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.
In November 2021, Bezos guaranteed to donate $2 billion towards restructuring food systems and nature conservation at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Bezos Academy is a group of tuition-free preschools for low-income students, created by Bezos and operated like the Montessori Method.

Meeting of Jeff Bezos with Mackenzie Tuttle

Bezos met MacKenzie Tuttle when they both job at D.E. Shaw: he was designated as a senior vice president, and she was an administrative assistant. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married in 1993. Bezos and MacKenzie have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

MacKenzie was an integral part of the founding and success of Amazon, helping create Amazon’s first business plan and serving as the company’s first accountant. Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie divorced in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Bezos’ stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his risk at almost $110 billion and MacKenzie’s at more than $37 billion. MacKenzie declared that she intended to give at least half her wealth to charity.