Jeff Bezos

01Jeffrey Preston Bezos, born January 12, 1964, is an American business magnate best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company.

02He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of 240 billion US dollars as of December 4, 2024, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

03He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.

04Due to his wealth and extensive influence over media, industry, and government policy, Bezos has sometimes been described as an oligarch.

05Bezos was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami.

06He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

07He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994.

08Bezos founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle.

09The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.

10It is the world's largest online sales company, the largest internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistance and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.

11Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000.

12Blue Origin's new Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015 and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth.

13He flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021.

14He purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions.

15In September 2021, Bezos co-founded Altos Labs with Mail.RU founder Yuri Milner, the first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Index and the second ever to have eclipsed the feat since Bill Gates in 1999.

16Bezos was named the richest man in modern history after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018.

17In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion.

18On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as the CEO and President of Amazon and took over the role of Executive Chairman.

19Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as the CEO and President of Amazon.

20Early Life and Education Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the son of Jacqueline, Nagais, and Ted Jorgensen.

21At the time of Jeff's birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19.

22Ted was a Danish-American unicyclist born in Chicago to a family of Baptists.

23After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacqueline attended night school, bringing her baby with her.

24Jeff attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was two.

25Ted struggled with alcohol and with his finances.

26Jacqueline left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965, when Jeff was 17 months old.

27After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel Mike Bezos in April 1968.

28Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jeff, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.

29Jacqueline, her husband, and her son left the area and asked Ted to discontinue contact, to which he agreed.

30After 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.

31Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from 4th to 6th grade.

32Jeff's maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Guise, a regional director of the U.S.

33Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, in Albuquerque.

34Lawrence retired early to his family's ranch near Cotula, 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 hectares, to 300,000 acres, 121,406 hectares.

35Jeff displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency, and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room.

36The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School.

37In high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.

38Bezos attended the student science training program at the University of Florida.

39He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.

40In his graduation speech, Bezos told the audience that he dreamed of the day when mankind would colonize space.

41A local newspaper quoted his intention to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.

42After graduating from high school in 1982, Bezos attended Princeton University.

43He initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science.

44In 2018, during a talk at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Bezos revealed that, some 30 years ago, his Princeton classmate Ysantha Rajakurunanek had defeated him in solving a mathematical problem, causing him to give up on his dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist.

45Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton's 11 eating clubs.

46Additionally, he was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS.

47He had a 4.2 GPA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.

48Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering, B.S.E., Summa Cum Laude.

49Business Career, Early Career After Bezos graduated from college in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Anderson Consulting, among others.

50He first worked at Fattel, a fintech telecommunications startup, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.

51Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter.

52He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990.

53He then joined D.E.

54Shaw & Co., a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modeling from 1990 until 1994.

55Bezos became D.E.

56Shaw's fourth senior vice president by age 30.

57Amazon 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.

58He and his then-wife, Mackenzie Scott, left their jobs at D.E.

59Shaw 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.

60With Bezos at the helm and Scott taking an integral role in its operation, writing checks, keeping track of the books, and negotiating the company's first freight contracts, the foundation was laid for this garage-run operation to grow exponentially.

61Prior to settling in Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.

62Bezos initially named his new company Kadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America.

63In part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet.

64At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with A would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches.

65In 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.

66He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents as an investment in Amazon.

67He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.

68Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.

69Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering, IPO.

70In 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 and Noble.

71In 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.

72In 2008, Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's 1997 equity offering to finance the aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors.

73In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.

74In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.

75In late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when revenue stagnated.

76After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce.

77In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $35 million.

78In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle.

79According 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.

80In 2013, Bezos secured a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, on behalf of Amazon Web Services.

81In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.

82In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than 1 million shares of his holdings in the company for $671 million, the largest sum he had ever raised from selling some of his Amazon stock.

83On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million.

84A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers.

85By January 19, 2018, his Amazon stock holdings had appreciated to slightly over $109 billion.

86Months later, he began to sell stock to raise cash for other enterprises, in particular Blue Origin.

87On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.

88On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion.

89Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often expressed interest in expanding Amazon into India.

90On July 27, 2017, Bezos momentarily became the world's wealthiest person over Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates when his estimated net worth increased to just over $90 billion.

91His wealth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, and he was formally designated the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes on March 6, 2018, with a net worth of $112 billion.

92In March 2018, Bezos dispatched Amit Agarwal, Amazon's global senior vice president, to India with $5.5 billion to localize operations throughout the company's supply chain routes.

93Later in the month, U.S., President Donald Trump accused Amazon and Bezos, specifically, of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices.

94Amazon's share price fell by 9% in response to the president's negative comments.

95This reduced Bezos' personal wealth by $10.7 billion.

96Weeks later, Bezos recouped his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University indicated that Trump could do little to regulate Amazon in any meaningful way.

97During July 2018, a number of members of the U.S.

98Congress called on Bezos to detail the applications of Amazon's face recognition software, Recognition.

99Criticism of Amazon's business practices continued in September 2018 when Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Bad employers by zeroing out subsidies.

100Stop Bezos?

101Act and accused Amazon of receiving corporate welfare.

102This followed revelations by the non-profit group New Food Economy, which found that one-third of Amazon workers in Arizona and one-tenth of Amazon workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio relied on food stamps.

103While preparing to introduce the bill, Sanders opined, Instead of attempting to explore Mars or go to the moon, how about Jeff Bezos pays his workers a living wage?

104He later said, Bezos could play a profound role.

105If he said today, nobody who is employed at Amazon will receive less than a living wage, it would send a message to every corporation in America.

106Sanders' efforts elicited a response from Amazon which pointed to the 130,000 jobs it created in 2017 and called the $28,446 figure for its median salary misleading as it included part-time workers.

107However, Sanders countered that the companies targeted by his proposal have placed an increased focus on part-time workers to escape benefit obligations.

108On October 2, 2018, Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase, which Sanders applauded.

109The American workers who were being paid the minimum wage had this increase to $15 per hour, a decision that was interpreted as support for the Fight for $15 movement.

110In February 2021, Bezos announced that in the third quarter of 2021, he would step down from his role as CEO of Amazon to become the executive chairman of the Amazon board.

111He was succeeded as CEO by Andy Jassy.

112On February 2, 2021, Bezos sent an email to all Amazon employees, telling them the transition would give him the time and energy need to focus on the Day One Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and other passions.

113In February 2024, Bezos sold 24 million shares in Amazon at a total value of $4 billion.

114Bezos announced that he intended to sell 50 million shares in Amazon over the next year.

115Blue Origin In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup.

116Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel and the development of human life in the solar system.

117His 1982 high school valedictorian senior graduation speech was followed up with a Miami Herald interview in which he expressed an interest to build and develop hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for human beings who were in orbit.

118The 18-year-old Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion.

119Rob Meyerson led Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017 and served as its first president.

120After its founding, Blue Origin maintained a low profile until 2006, when it purchased a large tract of land in West Texas for a launch and test facility.

121After the company gained the public's attention during the late 2000s, Bezos additionally indicated his interest in reducing the cost of space travel for humans while also increasing the safety of extraterrestrial travel.

122In September 2011, one of the company's uncrewed prototype vehicles crashed during a short-hop test flight.

123Although the crash was viewed as a setback, news outlets noted how far the company went from its founding to date in advancing spaceflight.

124After the crash, Bezos has been superstitiously wearing his lucky Texas cowboy boots to all rocket launches.

125In May 2013, Bezos met with Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Galactic, to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies.

126He has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk as all three are billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.

127In 2015, Bezos announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development and would make its first flight in the late 2010s.

128Later in November, Blue Origin's new Shepard space vehicle successfully rocketed into space and reached its planned test altitude of 329,839 feet, 100.5 kilometers, before executing a vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas.

129In 2016, Bezos allowed select journalists to visit, tour, and photograph his facility.

130He has repeatedly called for increased interspace energy and industrial manufacturing to decrease the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.

131In December 2017, New Shepard successfully flew and landed dummy passengers, amending and pushing its human space travel start date into late 2018.

132To execute this program, Blue Origin built six of the vehicles to support all phases of testing and operations.

133No passenger test flights, flights with test passengers, and commercial passenger weekly operations.

134Since 2016, Bezos has spoken more freely about his hopes to colonize the solar system and has been selling 1 billion US dollars in Amazon stock each year to capitalize Blue Origin in an effort to support this endeavor.

135In May 2018, Bezos maintained that the primary goal of Blue Origin is to preserve the natural resources of Earth by making the human species multi-planetary.

136He announced that New Shepard would begin transporting humans into suborbital space by November 2018.

137In July 2018, it was announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person.

138Spaceflight.

139On July 20, 2021, he launched on the NS-16 mission with his half-brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Damon.

140He launched nine days after Richard Branson launched on board the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission.

141Bezos' suborbital flight lasted over 10 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of 66.5 miles, 107.0 kilometers.

142The Washington Post.

143On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of the Washington Post for $250 million in cash, at the suggestion of his friend, Don Graham.

144To execute the sale, he established limited liability company Nash Holdings to serve as a holding company through which he would own the newspaper.

145The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings took control.

146In March 2014, Bezos made his first significant change at the Washington Post and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of a number of U.S.

147local newspapers in Texas, Hawaii, and Minnesota.

148In January 2016, Bezos set out to reinvent the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytic software.

149After a surge in online readership in 2016, the paper was profitable for the first time since Bezos made the purchase in 2013.

150Bezos Expeditions.

151Bezos makes personal investments through his venture capital vehicle, Bezos Expeditions.

152He was one of the first shareholders in Google when he invested $250,000 in 1998.

153That $250,000 investment resulted in 3.3 million shares of Google stock, worth about $3.1 billion in 2017.

154He also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging.

155Bezos is involved in the healthcare sector, which includes investments in Unity Biotechnology, Grail, Juno Therapeutics, and ZocDoc.

156In January 2018, an announcement was made concerning Bezos' role within a new, unnamed healthcare company.

157This venture, later named Haven, is expected to be a partnership between Amazon, J.P.

158Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway.

159Bezos also supports philanthropic efforts through direct donations and non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions.

160Bezos used Bezos Expeditions to fund several philanthropic projects, including an innovation center at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry and the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

161In 2013, Bezos Expeditions funded the recovery of two Saturn V first-stage Rocketdyne F1 engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

162They were positively identified as belonging to the Apollo 11 mission's S1C stage from July 1969.

163The engines are currently on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.

164Altos Labs In September 2021, Bezos co-founded Altos Labs with Mail.RU founder Yuri Milner.

165Altos Labs is a well-funded biotechnology company dedicated to harnessing cellular reprogramming to develop longevity therapeutics.

166The company has recruited prominent scientists such as Juan Carlos Ispizua Belmonte, known for work on rejuvenation through reprogramming, Steve Horvath, known for work in epigenetic aging clocks.

167And Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of cellular reprogramming in mammalian cells.

168The company left stealth mode and launched on January 19, 2022, with a start capital of $3 billion and an executive team led by Hal Barron.

169Public Image 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 cold-blooded corporate titan.

170During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare.

171Journalist Mark O'Connell criticized Bezos' relentless customer focus as very small in terms of impact on humanity as a whole, a sentiment technologist Tim O'Reilly agreed with.

172His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon.

173In 1999, Bezos was worth $10 billion yet drove a 1996 Honda Accord.

174Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy.

175Bezos was seen by some as needlessly quantitative and data-driven.

176This perception was detailed by Alan Deutschman, who described him as talking in lists and the criteria in order of importance for every decision he has made.

177Select accounts of his persona have drawn controversy and public attention.

178Notably, 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 than anyone else.

179Bezos has been characterized as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.

180During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for aggressive business practices, and his public image began to shift.

181Bezos started to wear tailored clothing.

182He weight-trained, pursued a regimented diet, and began to freely spend his money.

183His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon.

184He is often referred to as the metonym of the company.

185Since 2017, he has been portrayed by Kyle Mooney and Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live, usually as an undercutting, domineering figure.

186His physical appearance increased the public's perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parroted as an enterprising supervillain.

187In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation named Bezos the world's worst boss, with its general secretary Sharon Burrow saying, Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model.

188While in 2019, Harvard Business Review, which ranked Bezos the best-performing CEO for four 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.

189During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business-related expenses.

190His relative lack of philanthropy compared to other billionaires has drawn a negative response from the public since 2016.

191Bezos 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.

192Leadership Style Day 1 Management Philosophy Day 1 Startup Day 2 Stasis Day 3 Irrelevance Day 4 Excruciating Painful Decline Day 5 Death Bezos has stated it is always day 1 to describe his growth mindset.

193Bezos used what he called a regret minimization framework while working at D.E.

194Shaw and again during the early years of Amazon.

195He described this life philosophy by stating, When I'm 80, am I going to regret leaving Wall Street?

196No.

197Will I regret missing the beginning of the internet?

198Yes.

199During the 1990s and early 2000s at Amazon, he was characterized as trying to quantify all aspects of running the company, often listing employees on spreadsheets and basing executive decisions on data.

200To push Amazon forward, Bezos developed the mantra, Get Big Fast, establishing the company's need to scale its operations to produce market dominance.

201He favored diverting Amazon profits back into the company in lieu of allocating it amongst shareholders in the form of dividends.

202Bezos uses the term work, life harmony instead of the more standard work, life balance because he believes that balance implies that you can only have one and not the other.

203He believes that work and home life are interconnected, informing and calibrating each other.

204Journalist Walt Mossberg dubbed the idea that someone who cannot tolerate criticism or critique should not do anything new or interesting the Bezos principle.

205Bezos does not schedule early morning meetings and enforces a two-pizza rule, a preference that meetings are small enough for two pizzas to feed everyone in the boardroom.

206When interviewing candidates for jobs at Amazon, he has stated he considers three inquiries.

207Can he admire the person?

208Can the person raise the common standard?

209And under what circumstances could the person become exemplary?

210In 2018, it was reported that he met with Amazon investors for just six hours a year.

211Instead of using presentation slides, Bezos requires high-level employees to present information with six-page narratives.

212Since 1998, Bezos has published an annual letter for Amazon shareholders wherein he frequently refers to five principles.

213Focus on customers, not competitors.

214Take risks for market leadership.

215Facilitate staff morale.

216Build a company culture.

217And empower people.

218Bezos maintains the email address jeff at amazon.com as an outlet for customers to reach out to him and the company.

219Although he does not respond to the emails, he forwards some of them with a question mark in the subject line to executives, who then attempt to address the issues.

220Bezos has cited Jeff Amelt of New Enterprise Associates, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and Bob Iger of the Walt Disney Company as major influences on his leadership style.

221Recognition.

222In 1999, Bezos received his first major award when Time named him Person of the Year.

223In 2008, he was selected by U.S.

224News and World Report as one of America's best leaders.

225Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

226In 2011, the economist gave Bezos and Greg Zier an innovation award for the Amazon Kindle.

227In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune.

228He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg Conference in Street, Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 Conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England.

229He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council for 2011 and 2012 and appointed as chairman of the organization in 2014.

230Between 2014 to 2018, he was ranked the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.

231He has also figured in Fortune's list of 50 great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015.

232In September 2016, Bezos received a $250,000 prize for winning the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, which he donated to the students for the exploration and development of space.

233In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for Leadership and Innovation in Space Exploration, Autonomous Systems, and Building a Commercial Pathway for Human Space Flight.

234In March 2018, at the Explorer's Club annual dinner, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin.

235He received Germany's 2018 Axel Springer Award for Business Innovation and Social Responsibility.

236Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world on five separate occasions between 2008 and 2018.

237In 2019, Bezos was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, being awarded with the Jeff Bezos Freedom's Wings Award and the Ken Ricci Lifetime Aviation Entrepreneur Award.

238In February 2023, Bezos was presented with the Legion d'Owner, the highest French order of merit.

239Bezos had been designated a member of the Legion d'Owner about 10 years earlier but was not available to collect it.

240Wealth.

241Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997 after raising $54 million through Amazon's initial public offering, IPO.

242He was first included on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in 1999 with an estimated net worth of $10.1 billion, which placed his on the 19th position in the world and 10th in the USA.

243His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later, a 40.5% drop.

244His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion.

245He lost $500 million the following year, which brought his net worth down to $1.5 billion.

246The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion.

247From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion.

248After the financial crisis and succeeding economic recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion, a 17.7% drop.

249His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion.

250This percentage increase ascended him to the 43rd spot on the ranking from 68th.

251After a rumor broke out that Amazon was developing a smartphone, Bezos' net worth rose to $30.5 billion in 2014.

252A year later, he entered the top 10 when he increased his net worth to a total of $50.3 billion.

253Bezos rose to become the fifth richest person in the world hours before market close.

254He gained $7 billion in one hour.

255By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion.

256However, just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion to $66.5 billion, unofficially ranking him the third richest person in the world, behind Warren Buffett.

257After 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.

258Bezos would continue to sporadically surpass Gates throughout the month of October 2017 after Amazon's share price fluctuated.

259His net worth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%.

260When the 2017 list was issued, Bezos' net worth was registered at $72.8 billion, adding $27.6 billion from the previous year.

261His wealth's rapid growth from 2016 to 2017 sparked a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a controlled, reduced timescale.

262On October 10, 2017, he made an estimated $6.24 billion in five minutes, slightly less than the then-annual gross domestic product of Kyrgyzstan.

263On March 6, 2018, Bezos was designated the wealthiest person in the world, with a registered net worth of $112 billion.

264He unseated Bill Gates, $90 billion, who was $6 billion ahead of Warren Buffett, $84 billion, ranked third.

265He is considered the first registered centibillionaire, not adjusted for inflation.

266His wealth in 2017-18 terms equaled that of 2.7 million Americans.

267Bezos' net worth increased by $33.6 billion from January 2017 to January 2018.

268This increase outstripped the economic development in GDP terms of more than 96 countries around the world.

269During March 9, Bezos earned $230,000 every 60 seconds.

270The Motley Fool estimated that if Bezos had not sold any of his shares from its original public offering in 1997, his net worth would sit at $181 billion in 2018.

271According to Quartz, his net worth of $150 billion in July 2018 was enough to purchase the entire stock markets of Nigeria, Hungary, Egypt, Luxembourg, and Iran.

272Following the report by Quartz, Amazon workers in Poland, Germany, and Spain participated in demonstrations and labor strikes to draw attention to his growing wealth and the lack of compensation, labor rights, and satisfactory working conditions of select Amazon workers.

273On July 17, 2018, he was designated the wealthiest person in modern history by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, Market Watch, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

274In 2019, Bezos' wealth was reduced by the divorce from his wife Mackenzie Bezos.

275According to Forbes, had the Washington state common law applied to their divorce without a prenuptial agreement, Bezos' wealth could have been equitably divided with his ex-wife.

276However, she eventually received 25% of Bezos' Amazon shares, then valued at approximately $36 billion, making her the third richest woman in the world.

277Bezos retained his interest in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as voting control of the shares received by his ex-wife.

278In June 2019, Bezos purchased three adjoining apartments overlooking Madison Square Park in Manhattan, including a penthouse, for a combined total of $80 million, making this one of the most expensive real estate purchases within New York City in 2019.

279Bezos had also purchased three adjoining apartments at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan for $7.65 million in 1999.

280He bought a fourth unit in that building for $5.3 million in 2012.

281In February 2020, Bezos purchased the Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million, a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area.

282The previous record high price of $150 million was paid by Lachlan Murdoch for the Chartwell Mansion.

283During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was reported that Bezos' fortune had grown by $24 billion, citing a surge in demand from households on lockdown shopping on Amazon.

284He further expanded his residential holdings in February 2022, purchasing a $16.13-million apartment at a 24-story boutique condominium located across from Madison Square Park in the Flatiron neighborhood, where he already owns all the units on the top floors.

285Bezos is the owner of the Y721, a luxury superyacht estimated to cost more than $500 million.

286It is the largest yacht in the world.

287According to Forbes, Bezos was the second wealthiest person in America and the third wealthiest person in the world in 2023.

288Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

289His net worth is about $197 billion as of February 2024.

290Criticism.

291Bezos is known for creating an adversarial environment at Amazon, as well as insulting and verbally abusing his employees.

292As journalist Brad Stone revealed in his book The Everything Store, Bezos issued remarks to his employees such as, I'm sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?

293Are you lazy or just incompetent?

294And why are you ruining my life?

295Additionally, Bezos reportedly pitted Amazon teams against each other and once refused to give Amazon employees city bus passes in order to discourage them from leaving the office.

296Throughout his early years of ownership of the Washington Post, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the paper.

297Bezos and the newspaper's editorial board have dismissed accusations that he unfairly controlled the paper's content.

298And Bezos maintains that the paper is independent.

299Bezos' treatment of employees at the Washington Post has also drawn scrutiny.

300In 2018, more than 400 Washington Post employees wrote an open letter to Bezos criticizing his poor wages and benefits for his employees.

301The letter demanded fair wages, fair benefits for retirement, family leave and health care, and a fair amount of job security.

302Around 750 employees at the Washington Post went on a brief strike in December 2023 in response to Bezos' plans to lay off staff.

303In 2024, Bezos blocked the Washington Post's editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

304The move was criticized by former editor Marty Baron, who considered it to be an act of disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage and said that it would invite intimidation of Bezos by Donald Trump.

305Editor-at-large Robert Kagan also resigned in the wake of the decision.

306Personal life.

307In 1992, while Bezos was working for D.

308E.

309Shaw in Manhattan, he met novelist Mackenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm.

310The couple married a year later.

311In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon.

312Bezos and his now ex-wife Mackenzie are the parents of four children, three sons, and a daughter adopted from China.

313In March 2003, Bezos was a passenger in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas while surveying land to buy for Blue Origin.

314The other three occupants in the helicopter were pilot Charles Cheater Bella, Amazon lawyer Elizabeth Corral, and local rancher Ty Holland.

315All survived.

316Bezos sustained only minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.

317Bezos portrayed a Starfleet official in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening.

318He had lobbied Paramount for the role apropos of Alexa and his personal-slash-professional interest in speech recognition.

319His one line consisted of a response to an alien in distress.

320Speak normally.

321In 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.

322Bezos's family corporation Zefram LLC is named after Zefram Cochran, a character from Star Trek.

323In January 2019, Bezos and his wife Mackenzie released a joint statement which revealed that they would be getting divorced after 25 years together.

324Subsequently, National Enquirer revealed that Bezos had an affair with media personality Lauren Sanchez.

325The affair with Sanchez had lasted for months.

326Later, Bezos published an online essay on February 7, 2019, in which he accused American Media, Inc.

327Owner David Pecker of extortion and blackmail for threatening to publish intimate photos of Bezos and current girlfriend Lauren Sanchez if he did not stop his investigation into how his text messages and other photos had been leaked to the National Enquirer.

328Media reports have accused Sanchez's brother Michael of being the source for the photos obtained by National Enquirer.

329However, Bezos has speculated that it may have been the Saudi Arabian government.

330On April 4, 2019, the divorce was finalized.

331With Bezos keeping 75% of the couple's Amazon stock in McKenzie, getting the remaining 25%, $35.6 billion, in Amazon stock.

332However, Bezos would keep all of the couple's voting rights.

333On May 22, 2023, Sanchez and Bezos became engaged.

334He is the honorary chair of the Explorers Club.

335Politics.

336According to public campaign finance records, Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S.

337Senators from Washington.

338He has also supported Democrats U.S.

339Representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham U.S.

340Senators serving on committees dealing with internet-related issues.

341Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Bezos have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and in 2012 contributed $2.5 million 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.

342Bezos donated $100,000 towards a movement against a Washington state income tax in 2010 for top earners.

343In 2012, he donated to Amazon's Political Action Committee, PAC, which has given $56,000 and $74,500 to Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

344After 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.

345Trump has repeatedly criticized Bezos via Twitter, accused Bezos of avoiding corporate taxes, gaining undue political influence, and undermining his presidency by spreading fake news.

346Bezos 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.

347No nation has bigger opportunities.

348Wishing Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.

349In 2014, Amazon won a bid for a cloud computing contract with the CIA valued at $600 million.

350A 2018 $10 billion contract known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, JEDI Project, this time with the Pentagon, was allegedly written up in a way that favors Amazon.

351Controversy 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.

352In November 2019, when the contract was awarded to Microsoft instead, Amazon filed a lawsuit with allegations that the bidding process was biased.

353On July 6th, 2021, the Pentagon canceled 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.

354Despite Bezos' support for an open borders policy towards immigrants, Amazon has actively marketed facial recognition software to U.S.

355Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE.

356In 2019, a political action committee linked to Bezos spent over $1 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the re-election bid of Seattle City Council member and activist Kshama Sawant.

357On November 22, 2021, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million 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.

358Saudi Hacking Claim 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.

359In March 2019, Bezos' security consultant accused the Saudi government of hacking Bezos' phone.

360According to BBC, Bezos' top security staffer, Gavin DeBecker, linked the hack to the Washington Post's coverage of the murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

361Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and dissident, was employed as a writer at the Washington Post, owned by Bezos.

362Khashoggi was killed in late 2018 in Turkey's Saudi consulate for his critical stance and journalism against the Saudi government and its leader.

363In January 2020, The Guardian reported that the hack was initiated before the murder, but after Khashoggi wrote critically about the crown prince in the Washington Post.

364Forensic analysis of Bezos' mobile phone conducted by advisory firm FTI Consulting concluded it highly probable that the hack was achieved using a malicious file hidden in a video sent in a WhatsApp message to Bezos from the personal account of the crown prince on May 1, 2018.

365Saudi Arabia has denied the claim.

366Philanthropy.

367Bezos donated to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center several times between 2009 and 2017.

368In 2013, he pledged $500,000 to WorldReader, a non-profit founded by a former Amazon employee.

369In September 2018, Business Insider reported that Bezos was the only one of the top 5 billion millionaires in the world who had not signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that encourages wealthy people to give away a majority of their wealth.

370That same month, Janet Camarena, Director of Transparency Initiatives at Foundation Center, was quoted by CNBC as having questions about Bezos' New Day 1 fund, including the fund structure and how exactly it will be funded.

371In May 2017, Bezos gave $1 million to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides pro bono legal services for American journalists.

372On June 15, 2017, he posted a message on Twitter asking for ideas for philanthropy.

373I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time, working on the long term.

374At the time of the post, Bezos' lifetime spending on charitable causes was estimated to be $100 million.

375Multiple opinion columnists responded by asking Bezos to pay higher wages to Amazon warehouse workers.

376A year later in June, he tweeted that he would announce two philanthropic foci by the end of summer 2018.

377Bezos announced in September 2018 that he would commit approximately $2 billion to a fund to deal with American homelessness and establish a network of non-profit preschools for low-income communities.

378As part of this announcement, he committed to establishing the Day 1 Families Fund to finance night shelters and daycare centers for homeless families and the Day 1 Academies Fund for early childhood education.

379In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million donation to the Dreamed U.S., a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.

380In June 2018, Bezos donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates aimed at promoting emissions-free energy.

381In September 2018, Bezos donated $10 million to With Honor, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase the number of veterans in political office.

382In February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund.

383Later that year, in November, Bezos announced $791 million of donations to established well-known groups, with $100 million each going to Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund, and the remainder going to 11 other groups.

384In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.

385In November 2021, Bezos pledged to donate $2 billion towards restructuring food systems and nature conservation at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

386In July 2021, Bezos announced Courage and Civility Award and donated $100 million each to lawyer Van Jones and chef Jose Andres.

387Next year, he donated $100 million to singer Dolly Parton in recognition of her charity work, focused on improving children's literacy around the world.

388In March 2024, he donated $50 million each to actress Eva Longoria and retired Admiral Bill McRaven.

389Bezos Academy is a group of tuition-free preschools for students from low-income families, which was created by Bezos, and which operate in a manner similar to the Montessori method, but are not accredited as Montessori schools.

390On November 22, 2022, Bezos awarded $123 million to organizations that are engaged in relocating homeless families to permanent housing.

391Day One Families Fund grants, the amounts of which vary in monetary terms, will be sent to 40 organizations across the country.

392This was the English Wikipedia article about Jeff Bezos as of December 4, 2024 narrated by AI-generated voice via the open-source software Sony Translate.

393Day One Families Fund