jeff bezos life biography

American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.

Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Quick facts, early life and education, career in finance, amazon: start and success through the years, blue origin, owner of the washington post, healthcare venture, philanthropy: bezos day one fund and earth fund, personal life: ex-wife, fiancée, and kids.

1964-present

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and executive chair of the e-commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post , and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the internet’s biggest success stories. He started Blue Origin in 2000, then in 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world; his estimated net worth is $137.9 billion as of May 2023.

FULL NAME: Jeffrey Preston Bezos BORN: January 12, 1964 BIRTHPLACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico SPOUSE: MacKenzie Scott (1993-2019) CHILDREN: 3 sons and 1 daughter ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, known as Jeff Bezos, was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensens were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

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. He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

After high school, Bezos attended Princeton University. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduating from Princeton, 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 nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle, and targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his site. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage; they eventually expanded operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstations.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup team had envisioned.

Amazon went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys, and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early ’90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

As part of Bezos’ 2018 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 hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.

At the end of 2018, Amazon announced it was raising the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has still been criticized for its working conditions and grueling pace, with workers protesting during Prime Day in July 2019.

Amazon Instant Video & Amazon Studios

In 2006, Amazon launched its video-on-demand service. Initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually 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 . The company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee ’s Chi-Raq , in 2015.

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 on IMDb .

In early 2018, The Seattle Times reported that Amazon had consolidated its consumer retail operations in order to focus on growing areas including digital entertainment and Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant.

Kindle E-Reader

Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read, and store their book selections, in 2007.

Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling 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. “We haven’t built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,” Bezos said, according to ABC News .

Amazon Drones

In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called Amazon Prime Air, using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said these drones would be able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and be capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company’s distribution centers.

The first Prime Air delivery took place in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016.

Bezos oversaw one of Amazon’s few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014. Criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year.

Acquiring Whole Foods

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.

The company began offering in-store deals to Amazon Prime customers and grocery delivery in as little as two hours, depending on the market. As a result, Walmart and Kroger also began offering meal delivery to its customers.

Stepping Down as Amazon CEO

In February 2021, Amazon announced that Bezos would step down as CEO in the third quarter of the year. In fact, he transitioned to executive chair of Amazon’s board slightly ahead of schedule in July. Longtime Amazon employee Andy Jassy replaced Bezos as CEO.

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes. “We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen,” Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company’s chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham .

“ The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. “But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote:

“The values of The Post do not need changing... There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper’s technology staff (hundreds of those employees published an open letter to their boss asking for salary increases and better benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted several scoops, including revealing that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russians, leading to his resignation.

By 2016, the organization said it was profitable. The following year, the Post had an ad revenue of more than $100 million, with three straight years of double-digit revenue growth. Amazon soon bypassed The New York Times digital in unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019, according to ComScore.

On January 30, 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase delivered a joint press release in which they announced plans to pool their resources to form a new healthcare company for their U.S. employees. According to the release, the company will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints” as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction for patients, with an initial focus on technology solutions.

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Bezos said. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

As one of the world’s wealthiest people, Bezos had been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of philanthropic efforts. But in recent years, he has made major philanthropic donations through two new initiatives.

In 2018, Bezos and then-wife MacKenzie Scott launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on “funding existing nonprofits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities.” The announcement came a year after Bezos had asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune. Bezos gave away $2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit.

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

Bezos met MacKenzie Scott (then MacKenzie Tuttle) when they both worked at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills to fund her writing career. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married shortly thereafter in 1993. Bezos and Scott have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

Scott 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. A novelist by trade, training under Toni Morrison during her college years at Princeton University, Scott published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright , in 2005, and her second novel, Traps , in 2013.

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

Right after Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie in January 2019, The National Enquirer published an 11-page exposé of the business mogul’s extramarital affair with television host Lauren Sanchez. Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into the motives of The National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. The following month, in a lengthy post on Medium, Bezos accused AMI of threatening to publish explicit photos unless he backed off the investigation.

“Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” Bezos wrote. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

In that same post, Bezos suggested that there was possibly a link between AMI’s actions and the Saudi Arabian government. Later, a forensic analysis of Bezos’ phone revealed that it was hacked after he received a video via WhatsApp from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman .

Sanchez divorced her husband in April 2019. She and Bezos made their first public appearance as a couple that July at Wimbledon. In late May 2023, Page Six first reported that Bezos and Sanchez are engaged.

• It’s perfectly healthy—encouraged, even—to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea to.
• We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention. (On the future of The Washington Post )

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Jeffrey p. bezos, founder and executive chairman, amazon.com.

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I knew that if I failed, I would regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

Jeffrey P. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother was still in her teens, and her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Jeffrey was four. Jeffrey’s stepfather, Mike Bezos, was born in Cuba; he escaped to the United States alone at age 15, and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Jeffrey’s mother, the family moved to Houston, where Mike Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. Jeffrey’s maternal ancestors were early settlers in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000-acre ranch at Cotulla. Jeffrey’s grandfather was a regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the family ranch, where Jeffrey spent most of the summers of his youth, working with his grandfather at the enormously varied tasks essential to the operation.

From an early age, Jeffrey displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. Even as a toddler, he asserted himself by dismantling his crib with a screwdriver. He also developed intense and varied scientific interests, rigging an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and converting his parents’ garage into a laboratory for his science projects. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Miami, Florida. In high school in Miami, Jeffrey first fell in love with computers. An outstanding student, he was valedictorian of his class. He entered Princeton University planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers, and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduation, Jeff Bezos found employment on Wall Street, where computer science was increasingly in demand to study market trends. He went to work at Fitel, a start-up company that was building a network to conduct international trade. He stayed in the finance realm with Bankers Trust, rising to a vice presidency. At D. E. Shaw, a firm specializing in the application of computer science to the stock market, Bezos was hired as much for his overall talent as for any particular assignment.  While working at Shaw, Jeff met MacKenzie Tuttle, also a Princeton graduate. They began dating and were married in 1993. Bezos rose quickly at Shaw, becoming a senior vice president, and was looking forward to a bright career in finance when he made a discovery that changed his life — and the course of business history.

The Internet was originally created by the Defense Department to keep its computer networks connected during an emergency, such as natural catastrophe or enemy attack. Over the years, it was adopted by government and academic researchers to exchange data and messages, but as late as 1994, there was still no Internet commerce to speak of. One day that spring, Jeffrey Bezos observed that Internet usage was increasing by 2,300 percent a year. He saw an opportunity for a new sphere of business, and immediately began considering the possibilities. In typically methodical fashion, Bezos reviewed the top 20 mail order businesses, and asked himself which could be conducted more efficiently over the Internet than by traditional means. Books were the commodity for which no comprehensive mail order catalogue existed, because any such catalogue would be too big to mail — perfect for the Internet, which could share a vast database with a virtually limitless number of people.

He flew to Los Angeles the very next day to attend the American Booksellers’ Convention and learn everything he could about the book business. He found that the major book wholesalers had already compiled electronic lists of their inventory. All that was needed was a single location on the Internet, where the book-buying public could search the available stock and place orders directly. Bezos’s employers weren’t prepared to proceed with such a venture, and Bezos knew the only way to seize the opportunity was to go into business for himself. It would mean sacrificing a secure position in New York, but he and his wife, Mackenzie, decided to make the leap.

Jeff and Mackenzie flew to Texas on Independence Day weekend and picked up a 1988 Chevy Blazer (a gift from Mike Bezos) to make the drive to Seattle, where they would have ready access to the book wholesaler Ingram, and to the pool of computer talent Jeff would need for his enterprise. Mackenzie drove while Jeff typed a business plan. The company would be called Amazon, for the seemingly endless South American river with its numberless branches.

They set up shop in a two-bedroom house, with extension cords running to the garage. Jeff set up three Sun microstations on tables he’d made out of doors from Home Depot for less than $60 each. When the test site was up and running, Jeff asked 300 friends and acquaintances to test it. The code worked seamlessly across different computer platforms. On July 16, 1995, Bezos opened his site to the world, and told his 300 beta testers to spread the word. In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries. By September, it had sales of $20,000 a week. Bezos and his team continued improving the site, introducing such unheard-of features as one-click shopping, customer reviews, and e-mail order verification.

The business grew faster than Bezos or anyone else had ever imagined. When the company went public in 1997, skeptics wondered if an Internet-based start-up bookseller could maintain its position once traditional retail heavyweights like Barnes and Noble or Borders entered the Internet picture. Two years later, the market value of shares in Amazon was greater than that of its two biggest retail competitors combined, and Borders was striking a deal for Amazon to handle its Internet traffic. Jeff had told his original investors there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their entire investment, but his parents signed on for $300,000, a substantial portion of their life savings. “We weren’t betting on the Internet,” his mother has said. “We were betting on Jeff.” By the end of the decade, as six percent owners of Amazon, they were billionaires. For several years, as much as a third of the shares in the company were held by members of the Bezos family.

From the beginning, Bezos sought to increase market share as quickly as possible, at the expense of profits. When he disclosed his intention to go from being “Earth’s biggest bookstore” to “Earth’s biggest anything store,” skeptics thought Amazon was growing too big too fast, but a few analysts called it “one of the smartest strategies in business history.” Through each round of expansion, Jeff Bezos continually emphasized the “Six Core Values: customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar and innovation.” “Our vision,” he said, “is the world’s most customer-centric company. The place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Amazon moved into music CDs, videos, toys, electronics and more. When the Internet’s stock market bubble burst, Amazon re-structured, and while other dot.com start-ups evaporated, Amazon was posting profits.

In October 2002, the firm added clothing sales to its line-up, through partnerships with hundreds of retailers, including The Gap, Nordstrom, and Land’s End. Amazon shares its expertise in customer service and online order fulfillment with other vendors through co-branded sites, such as those with Borders and Toys ‘R Us, and through its Amazon Services subsidiary. In September 2003, Amazon announced the formation of A9, a new venture aimed at developing a commercial search engine that focuses on e-commerce websites. At the same time, Amazon launched an online sporting goods store, offering 3,000 different brand names. Amazon.com ended 2015 with net revenue of $107 billion. Amazon has become America’s largest online retailer, with more than four times the sales of its nearest rival.

The success of Amazon has allowed Bezos to explore his lifelong interest in space travel. In 2004, he founded an aerospace company, Blue Origin, to develop new technology for spaceflight, with the ultimate goal of establishing an enduring human presence beyond Earth. From its 26-acre research campus outside Seattle and a private rocket launching facility in West Texas, Blue Origin is testing New Shepard, a multi-passenger rocket-propelled vehicle designed to travel to and from suborbital space at competitive prices. New Shepard will allow researchers to conduct more frequent experiments in a microgravity environment, as well as providing the general public with an opportunity to experience spaceflight. In its mission statement, Blue Origin identifies its ultimate goal as the establishment of an enduring human presence in outer space.

As exciting as that prospect may be, Jeff Bezos has had more terrestrial innovations on his mind as well. In 2007, Amazon introduced a handheld electronic reading device — the Kindle. The device used “E Ink” technology to render text in a print-like appearance, without the eyestrain associated with television and computer screens. The font size was adjustable for further ease in reading, and, unlike earlier electronic reading devices, the Kindle incorporated wireless Internet connectivity, enabling the reader to purchase, download and read complete books and other documents anywhere, anytime. Hundreds of books can be stored on the Kindle at a time. Many classics can be downloaded free of charge; all new titles were initially priced at $9.99.

In the year the Kindle was introduced, Amazon’s sales increased by 38 percent, and its profits more than doubled. In 2010, Amazon signed a controversial deal with The Wylie Agency, in which Wylie gave Amazon the digital rights to the works of many of the authors it represents, bypassing the original publishers altogether. This, and Amazon’s practice of selling e-books at a price far below that of the same title in hardcover, angered several publishers, as well as some authors, who see their royalty rates threatened. But it appears that the advent of electronic reading devices is increasing the overall sales of books, which can only benefit readers and authors alike. By mid-2010, Kindle and e-book sales had reached $2.38 billion, and Amazon’s sales of e-books topped its sales in hardcover. With e-book sales increasing by 200 percent a year, Bezos predicted that e-books would overtake paperbacks and become the company’s bestselling format within a year.

With the introduction of the Kindle, Amazon quickly captured 95 percent of the U.S. market for books in electronic form — e-books. The first major challenge to the Kindle’s supremacy in the e-book market came in 2010, when Apple introduced its iPad tablet computer, which was also designed for use as an electronic reading device. Bezos responded aggressively, cutting the Kindle’s retail price and adding new features.

In 2011, Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a mini tablet computer with a color touch screen, to compete directly with the iPad. Amazon also took the handheld e-reader to a new level of comfort and convenience with the Kindle Paperwhite, an illuminated touchscreen device that can be read comfortably in a darkened room. A Whispersync feature enables users with multiple devices to mark their place in one book and resume reading at the same place in another. Having already revolutionized the way the world buys books, Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way we read them as well.

Amazon now boasts a host of diversified subsidiaries, including AmazonLocal and LivingSocial. Business customers can employ Amazon’s online infrastructure technology through Amazon Web Services. In 2012, Bezos launched Amazon Studios, crowdsourcing the development of feature films and television shows. Amazon plans to present the television programs through an online video service, the feature films in brick-and-mortar theaters. The company’s share price increased 30 percent in 2012 alone, tenfold over the previous six-year period. Fortune magazine named Bezos its 2012 “Businessperson of the Year.”

In 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper division of The Washington Post Company for $250 million. In addition to The Washington Post , the leading daily newspaper in the nation’s capital, the sale included a number of smaller local newspapers in the Washington, D.C. area. Bezos made the purchase as principal of a privately held company, rather than on behalf of Amazon. It was the first time in 80 years that the newspaper had passed from the control of the Graham family, descendants of Eugene Meyer, who bought the paper in 1933. At the time of the sale, Bezos expressed respect and admiration for the Graham family’s stewardship of the Post and announced his intention to retain the existing management.

Early in 2017, Bloomberg News estimated that Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $75.6 billion, making him the second wealthiest person in the world, second only to Microsoft founder  Bill Gates . That summer, the rapid rise in the value of Amazon shares boosted the value of the founder’s stake by over  $1 billion in a single day. Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos became noted philanthropists in the Seattle area.  “Giving away money takes as much attention as building a successful company,” Jeff Bezos has said.

In 2017, Amazon purchased national grocery retailer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.   While Whole Foods stores will continue to sell high-end delicacies and organic produce, they will also serve as delivery locations for Amazon’s online retail business, extending the company’s reach into ever more areas of the economy.  As the world entered the 2017 holiday shopping season, Amazon’s stock price soared, raising the net worth of founder Jeff Bezos and making him the wealthiest person in the world.  His net worth continued to grow, and in July 2018 was estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index to be over $150 billion, roughly $55 billion greater than that of anyone else on Earth.

In addition to their philanthropic activities, MacKenzie Bezos has pursued a separate career as a novelist, publishing The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and Traps in 2013.  Together, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos founded the homeless charity Day One Fund in 2018.   In January 2019, the couple announced plans to divorce.   Over the course of their 25-year marriage, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos raised four children and maintained homes in Medina, Washington and in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Van Horn, Texas.

In the first months of 2020, a global pandemic rocked the world’s economy, but as people all over the world sheltered at home, the demand for Amazon’s online services exploded and the company’s stock price surged along with it. By August 2020, his personal stake in the company gave Jeff Bezos an estimated net worth of more than $200 billion, making him by far the wealthiest individual in history.

At the peak of this success, Jeff Bezos announced his decision to relinquish the role of CEO at Amazon, effective as of summer 2021. He continues to serve as Executive Chairman of the global retail, communications and media empire he has built.  He is now focusing more of his energy on his aerospace initiative, Blue Origin. In 2021, he announced that he will be one of the crew on board Blue Origin’s first manned space flight. On July 14, 2021, the Smithsonian Institution announced it would receive a $200 million donation from Jeff Bezos — the largest gift to the Smithsonian since the Institution’s founding gift from James Smithson in 1846. A $70 million portion of the donation will support the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum, and $130 million will launch a new education center at the museum.

On May 19, 2023, a team led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin won a coveted $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a 50-foot-tall spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the moon’s surface. The mission, Artemis V, is scheduled to launch in 2029 and is another critical piece of NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the moon as part of an effort to explore its south pole region.

On May 22, 2023, Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, announced their engagement. The couple, who made their relationship public in 2019, have largely kept their personal lives under wraps, mostly appearing together at various public events. Sánchez, a former broadcast journalist turned philanthropist, and Bezos have been working together on their philanthropic endeavors, strategically distributing Bezos’s vast wealth to a variety of causes. In May 2024, Jeff Bezos, at 60, ranked second on Bloomberg’s wealth index with a net worth of $208 billion, largely due to his ownership of the world’s largest online retailer.

“I’m going to go do this crazy thing. I’m going to start this company selling books online.”

In 1994, Jeff Bezos was a 30-year-old vice president of a New York investment firm, newly married, with a secure and prosperous future ahead of him. He decided to give it all up and drive to Seattle with his wife, in a used car, to start a business in their garage. He was betting his own savings — and his parents’ and friends’ — on a totally untried notion: that people would buy books through a little-known network of computers called the Internet.

Jeff Bezos was convinced that this global network, primarily the domain of academics and government scientists, could become a vibrant new venue for commerce, with the right product and the right plan. Almost overnight, the company Bezos started, Amazon.com, changed the book-buying habits of a nation. Bezos and his investors found their shares in the company worth billions.

As the company’s capitalization soared, Bezos embarked on a risky strategy of expansion, forgoing immediate profits to secure an ever-larger share of the Internet market, not only in books, but in music, videos, electronics, toys and clothing. At the turn of the 21st century, the Internet bubble burst, and fortunes seemingly made overnight literally vanished. Yet Amazon flowed on like its mighty namesake, still expanding, but also showing profits, while other promising start-ups faded from the scene. Once-daunting competitors had become grateful partners.  By 2018, the growth in Amazon’s stock price had made its founder and principal shareholder the wealthiest man in history.  The vision of Jeff Bezos had prevailed, and the world of commerce had changed forever.

When did you get the idea to start Amazon? Was there a moment of inspiration?

Jeff Bezos: The wake-up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don’t grow that fast.   It’s highly unusual, and that started me about thinking, “What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”

You couldn’t have been the only one to see that growth statistic.

Jeff Bezos: No. In fact, not only was I not the only one, but a lot of people saw it much earlier.

Not everyone has been able to realize that potential the way you have. What do you think enabled you to see what you saw and to act on it?

Jeff Bezos: I think there are a couple of things. One of the things everybody should realize is that any time a start-up company turns into a substantial company over the years, there was a lot of luck involved. There are a lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who are very smart, very hardworking, very few ever have the planetary alignment that leads to a tiny little company growing into something substantial. So that requires not only a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, a big team of people who are all dedicated, but it also requires that not only the planets align, but that you get a few galaxies in there aligning, too. That’s certainly what happened to us.

Our timing was good, our choice of product categories — books — was a very good choice. And we did a lot of analysis on that to pick that category as the first best category for e-commerce online, but there were no guarantees that that was a good category. At the time we launched this business it wasn’t even crystal clear that the technology would improve fast enough that ordinary people — non-computer people — would even want to bother with this technology. So that was good luck. So there are a whole bunch of things that have to sort of align to make it work.

Here you were, sitting in New York City in a very good job, a lucrative position with a future. You go home and you say to your wife you want to throw all that over and get in the car and go to Seattle. What possessed you to do that? What was her reaction? What is the role of risk taking?

Jeff Bezos: I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two-hour walk in Central Park in New York City, and the conclusion of that was this: he said, “You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. So, I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, “Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do.” It’s true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Most regrets, by the way, are acts of omission and not commission. If you do bad things, if you go murder somebody, that would be bad and that would be an act of commission that you would regret. But most everyday, ordinary non-murderers, when they’re 80 years old, their big regrets are omissions.

When you showed up in Seattle, you had left your job, you’d left any regrets you might have behind you. How do you get something like Amazon.com started? What did you have to do?

Jeff Bezos: That blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages, and one of the reasons it’s hard is because at that stage there’s nobody counting on you but yourself. Today it’s easy because we’ve got millions of customers counting on us, and thousands of investors counting on us, and thousands of employees all counting on each other. In that beginning stage it’s really just you, and you can quit any time. Nobody is going to care, so you set about doing the simple things first.

So, you want to start a company.   Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan, and so I did that.   I wrote about a 30-page business plan.   I wrote a first draft.   In fact, I wrote the first draft on the car trip from the East Coast to the West Coast.   And, that is very helpful. You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality. It will always be different. The reality will never be the plan, but the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on.   So, that’s the first step.

We tried to get a lot of the little housekeeping details done even before we arrived in Seattle. I called a friend who lived in Seattle and asked if he could recommend an attorney. He recommended his divorce lawyer, but that’s who we used. It was a general practitioner, a sort of small sole practitioner. He incorporated the company. He asked me on the cell phone what name would you like the company incorporated under. I said, “Cadabra, as in abra cadabra.” And he said, “Cadaver?” I knew then that was not going to be a good name. We went ahead and incorporated under that name. We changed it about three months later.

I stopped in San Francisco and interviewed vice presidents of engineering, because that was going to be an important long lead time item. We needed to build the technology that would run the store, and found the person who turned out to be the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com on that trip. A guy named Shel Kaphan, who built all of our early systems. He had help from others, but he was the architect, he engineered them, and just did a fantastic job. So writing the business plan, the initial hiring, getting the company incorporated, all these are simple, almost pedestrian tasks, but that’s how you start, one step at a time.

Were investors knocking at your door?

Jeff Bezos: Oh no.

The first initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com.   And you know, that was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do because they didn’t know. My dad’s first question was, “What’s the Internet?” Okay.   So he wasn’t making a bet on this company or this concept.   He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother. So, I told them that I thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their whole investment, which was a few hundred thousand dollars, and they did it anyway.   And, you know, I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because   really, if you look at the odds of a start-up company succeeding at all, it’s only about ten percent.   Here I was, giving myself a 30 percent chance.

There are so many things that can go wrong. When we launched that store in July of 1995, we were shocked at the customer response. Literally in the first 30 days we had orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries, and we were woefully unprepared from an operational point of view to handle that kind of volume. In fact, we quickly expanded. We talked to our landlord, and we expanded into a 2,000-square-foot basement warehouse space that had six-foot ceilings. One of our ten employees was six-two; he went around like this the whole time. We were doing our day jobs, which might have been computer programming — all the different things that ten people will do in a tiny start-up company. And then we would spend all afternoon into the wee hours of the morning packing up the orders and shipping them out. I would drive these things to UPS so we could get the last one, and we would wait till the last second. I’d get to UPS and I would sort of bang on the glass door that was closed. They would always take pity on me and sort of open up and let us ship things late.

We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for, that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all. In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor. I remember, just to show you how stupid I can be — my only defense is that it was late. We were packing these things, everybody in the company, and I had this brainstorm as I said to the person next to me, “This packing is killing me! My back hurts, this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor,” and this person said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” And I said, “You know what we need?” My brilliant insight. “We need knee pads!'” I was very serious, and this person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they’d ever seen. I’m working for this person? This is great. “What we need is packing tables .”

I looked at this person, and I thought that was the smartest idea I had ever heard.   The next day we got packing tables, and I think we doubled our productivity.   That early stage, by the way of Amazon.com, when we were so unprepared, is probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us, because it formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company.   Every single person in the company, because we had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well, and that is our goal, to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.   In a second round of fundraising, about a year later or so, we raised a million dollars, and I had to talk to about 60 different people.   These were angel investors. Venture capitalists were totally uninterested. It wasn’t like what people think of today.

In 1998 and 1999 you could raise $60 million for an Internet idea without a business plan with a single phone call.   It was a very different era, but back in 1995 it was very difficult to raise money. And, by the way, it wasn’t more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money, it just was sort of normally hard. It’s supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. So, with a lot of hard work we raised that million dollars from about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each, and that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com.

Did you ever have any self-doubts, fear of failure?

Jeff Bezos: In a strange way, no. Because remember…

Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way — it’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic — and so if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It’s sort of like, I don’t have any doubt about whether we’re going to fail. That’s the likely outcome. It just is, and to pretend that it’s not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So, what you do with those early investment dollars — if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars — what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So, you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are, and you try to eliminate them one at a time. That’s how small companies get a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where the company has more control over its future destiny.

When a company is very tiny, it needs a tremendous amount of not only hard work but, as we talked about earlier, luck.   As a company gets bigger, it starts to become a little more stable. At a certain point in time the company has a much bigger influence over its future outcome, and it needs a lot less luck, and instead it needs the hard work.   At that point there’s a little bit more pressure, because if you fail you have nobody to blame but yourself.

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Inside the life and career of Jeff Bezos, the tech CEO who founded Amazon

• Jeff Bezos began his career as a hedge-funder in New York before leaving to start Amazon .
• Amazon struggled to turn a profit at first, but is one of the world's biggest companies today.
• Along the way, Bezos has faced antitrust scrutiny, weathered scandals, traveled to space, and become one of the world's richest people.

Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable names in business.

The 59-year-old tech titan worked at a hedge fund before he left to start Amazon as an online bookseller, ultimately growing it into one of the world's largest companies by revenue. He's also founded space tourism company Blue Origin, which has flown him to the edge of space.

He's a fixture on the world's wealthiest list. Bezos is the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $158 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . His net worth took a slight hit in August 2024, decreasing by $15.2 billion after a stock slump that hit the pockets of many of the world's richest.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tops the list of the world's richest billionaires with a total net worth of $235 billion.

With all of his wealth, Bezos has made some splashy purchases. He's the 24th-largest landowner in the United States with 420,000 acres, according to the 2022 Land Report , with a real estate portfolio boasting mansions in Hawaii, California, Florida, and more. Bezos also owns the world's biggest sailing yacht , a 417-footer that cost an estimated $500 million.

From from his first job flipping burgers at McDonald's to building Amazon into a trillion-dollar company at one point, here's a look at Jeff Bezos' life and career. 

Allana Akhtar and Avery Hartmans contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

Jeff Bezos' mom, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him on January 12, 1964.

She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who later adopted Jeff.

Jeff didn't learn that Miguel, who often goes by Mike, wasn't his real father until he was 10 years old, but he told Wired he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.

In 1968, his mother told his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives.

When author Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his 2013 book "The Everything Store," Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.

From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers at his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.

Decades later, Bezos purchased his own land in Texas . His acreage is used as the launch site for Blue Origin rockets.

Bezos described his grandfather, Preston Gise, as an intelligent, quiet man who has been an inspiration to him. 

At a commencement address in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him "it's harder to be kind than clever."

Bezos' first job was cooking burgers at a McDonald's in Miami.

Bezos described the gig at McDonald's as "really hard" in a 2001 interview with Fast Company.

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers. This was my acned-teenager stage. They were like, 'Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'" Bezos said.

As a child, Bezos fell in love with reruns of the original "Star Trek" and became a fan of later versions too.

He even considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, a reference to a line from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, according to the book "The Everything Store." Bezos also considered naming Amazon Cadabra .

In 2016, Bezos even filmed a cameo in a "Star Trek" movie.

At his South Florida high school, Bezos said he wanted to be a "space entrepreneur."

Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age. When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed, according to an account in the book "The Everything Store."

In school, Bezos would tell teachers that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Of course, he's made that dream a reality: He now owns space exploration company Blue Origin.

To avoid spending a summer flipping burgers at McDonald's, Bezos and his high school girlfriend started a summer camp.

Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids, focused on science, math, and reading.

The camp had six kids who each paid $600 for the session — though two of them were Bezos' siblings. "The Lord of the Rings" series was required reading , and science lessons focused on fossil fuels and space.

In 2017, Amazon reportedly paid around $250 million to secure the rights to make a "Lord of the Rings" TV show, with Bezos himself said to be personally involved in the negotiations to land the deal. The company went on to spend an estimated $1 billion producing the first season of the show, making it one of the most expensive seasons of television ever.

Upon graduating high school in 1982, Bezos enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in computer science.

Upon graduation, he turned down job offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a telecommunications startup called Fitel, according to the book "The Everything Store."

After he quit Fitel, he went to Bankers Trust where he worked as a product manager.

While at Bankers Trust, Bezos focused on selling software pension-fund client.

He left Banker's Trust after two years for hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He became a senior vice president after only four years of working at D.E. Shaw . 

Meanwhile, Bezos was taking ballroom dancing classes as part of a scheme to increase what he called his "women flow."

The term was a play on Wall Street's "deal flow" and referred to the number of opportunities he had to meet women.

He ended up meeting his future wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at work.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was a D.E. Shaw research associate. The pair married in 1993 and they went on to have four kids together.

By 1994, Bezos's eye was on the internet, after reading about the web's immense growth in one year.

Bezos decided he needed to find some way to take advantage of its rapid growth. He made a list of 20 possible products to sell online and decided books were the best option, according to "The Everything Store" book. 

He decided to leave D.E. Shaw — a stable and lucrative job — in 1994 to start what would become Amazon.

His boss at the firm, David E. Shaw, tried to persuade Bezos to stay , but Bezos was already determined to start his own company.

MacKenzie and Jeff flew to Texas to borrow a car from his father, and then they drove to Seattle, which would become Amazon's headquarters.

Bezos was making revenue projections in the passenger seat the whole way, though the couple did stop to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Once they arrived, Bezos started Amazon.com in a garage.

He held most of his meetings at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble — which would soon become a competitor.

In the early days, a bell would ring in the office every time someone made a purchase.

Amazon's employees would gather to see if anyone knew the customer.

But it took only a few weeks before it was ringing so often that the company put an end to the bell, according to the book "The Everything Store."

In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and more than 45 different countries.

In 1997, less than three years after it was founded, Amazon went public on May 15.

More than 20 years after its IPO, Amazon now has a market cap of $1.4 trillion and is one of the world's five largest public companies.

When the dot-com crash came, analysts called the company "Amazon.bomb." But it weathered the storm.

The website ended up being one of the startups that wasn't wiped out.

Amazon has now gone beyond selling books to offering almost everything you can imagine.

The company has hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world and offers appliances, clothing, groceries, toiletries, and even cloud computing services.

In the early days, Bezos was said to be a demanding boss.

Bezos could explode at employees , and rumors circulated that he hired a leadership coach to help him tone it down. He also reportedly gave sarcastic responses when he was upset. 

At one point, Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.

Instead, Bezos required his staff to turn in papers on their proposals. This, he believed, would encourage critical thinking.

Bezos is also known for creating a frugal company culture.

This contrasts with other big tech firms, which offer free food and perks. 

Bezos told Business Insider in 2014 that Amazon did offer great amenities to its employees, but they just weren't the same as other tech companies. 

His time leading Amazon was not without controversy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon saw a surge in demand as more people were forced to shop online. But the company faced criticism over its treatment of workers , who said the company paid little attention to their health and safety at its fulfillment centers nationwide.

Amazon delivery drivers , who are contractors employed by third-party companies, have also spoken out about the demands of their jobs. Some drivers say Amazon's emphasis on metrics has forced them to use their delivery vans as bathrooms or sacrifice safety to deliver packages on time.

Amazon has faced antitrust concerns , particularly over its treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. Bezos and other tech CEOs were called to testify before Congress in 2020.

He's also gotten rich as an early investor in Google.

Bezos invested $250,000 in Google . That translated to 3.3 million shares when the company went public in 2004.

Today, that would be worth more than $400 million. Bezos hasn't said whether he kept any of his stock after the initial public offering.

Despite his high net worth , Bezos had the same annual base salary for decades while he was CEO: $81,840.

His annual total compensation for many years exceeded $1 million owing to costs related to security and business travel.

In July 2017, Bezos became the world's richest person for the first time.

He momentarily surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a net worth of more than $90 billion.

Today, Bezos is worth $157 billion, and he said he will give most of his wealth to charity.

Some of his more notable contributions include pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund , donating $200 million to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum , and pledging $100 million towards recovery efforts on Maui , where he owns a $78 million home, following the catastrophic wildfires.

But he's also spending his money on other business pursuits.

In August 2013, Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

And he's spent an unknown amount on the private space tourism company Blue Origin.

The company made history in 2015 when it successfully launched a reusable rocket.

The rocket, called New Shepard, traveled to an altitude of 62 miles. 

Bezos' interest in flying has gotten him into trouble in the past.

In 2003, Bezos almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas while scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin.

Over the years, Bezos has also built quite the real estate portfolio.

He is the country's 24th largest landowner with 420,000 acres.

In January 2017, Bezos was revealed as the anonymous buyer of the Textile Museum in DC's Kalorama neighborhood.

The property sold for $23 million, and with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, it is the largest home in Washington, DC.

Bezos also owns five apartments at 212 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

His most recent purchase in the city was in 2021, when he paid a reported $23 million for a four-bedroom unit. He's spent a total of $119 million on apartments in the building.

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner Estate, a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills, California.

He purchased the property for $165 million , making it California's most expensive real estate transaction at the time. Bezos bought the mansion from David Geffen, who had purchased it in 1990 for $47.5 million.

In 2021, Bezos bought a home in Hawaii located in an isolated area on Maui's south shore near lava fields. Bezos' Maui home reportedly cost $78 million.

Most recently, Bezos scooped up a $68 million waterfront mansion in Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village.

The sale to Bezos was record-breaking on the island, which has also been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

In January 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced they were divorcing.

"As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Jeff and MacKenzie announced on Twitter they had finalized the terms of their divorce in April 2019.

MacKenzie, who changed her last name to Scott, retained more than $35 billion in Amazon stock , making her one of the world's richest women.

Scott, whose net worth is $36 billion, has donated at least $14.5 billion since 2019 , when she vowed to give away most of her fortune in her lifetime.

Shortly after they announced their divorce, news broke that Bezos was dating TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

At the time, the National Enquirer said it had obtained texts and explicit photos the couple had sent to each other. The publication also said at the time that it had "raunchy messages" between Bezos and Sanchez . 

Bezos immediately launched an investigation into who had leaked his personal messages.

Soon after, he dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post accusing National Enquirer publisher AMI of trying to blackmail him .

"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote.

Since then, Bezos and Sanchez have had a whirlwind few years.

The couple are often captured traveling around the world together . They've been spotted attending Wimbledon together, yachting with other moguls and celebrities, and vacationing in Saint-Tropez and St. Barths.

Throughout the summer, they've frequently been spotted on Bezos' new yacht.

The ship, which cost an estimated $500 million to build , is at 417 feet long and said to be the largest in the world. 

In May, multiple outlets reported that the pair had gotten engaged.

They marked the engagement with a  party in August attended by guests like Bill Gates and Kris Jenner.

In February 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon's CEO and transition to executive chairman after 27 years at the company's helm.

Bezos said that he planned to spend more time on philanthropy — including the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day 1 Fund — as well as his two other major endeavors: The Washington Post and his rocket company, Blue Origin.

In July of 2021, he took an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft.

The trip marked his company's first human spaceflight .

He was accompanied by his brother, Mark; a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen ; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the '60s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.

Though Bezos remains the second-richest person in the world today, his wealth took a tumble this year and last year.

In Forbes' annual ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, Bezos came out as the biggest loser: His net worth fell $57 billion from March 2022 to March 2023, but still sat at a cool $114 billion at the time.

Amazon's stock fell 50% in 2022, and it became the first public company to ever lose $1 trillion in market value . Don't feel too bad for him — with Amazon's stock bouncing back this year, Bezos' wallet has largely recovered.

In August 2024, Bezos net worth took another hit when it fell by $15.2 billion. The loss was triggered by a stock slump that saw the world's richest billionaires lose a total of $134 billion.

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