1. Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company.
101 Facts About Jeff Bezos
1. 2.
Jeff Bezos was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
3.
Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami.
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Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.
5.
Jeff Bezos worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994.
6.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle.
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Jeff Bezos 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.
8.
Jeff Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000.
9.
On July 5,2021, Jeff Bezos stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon and took over the role of executive chairman.
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At the time of Jeff Bezos's birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19.
11.
Jeff Bezos attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was 2.
12.
Jacklyn left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff Bezos was 17 months old.
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Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.
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Jeff Bezos displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room.
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The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School.
16.
Jeff Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida.
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Jeff Bezos was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.
18.
Jeff Bezos initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science.
19.
In 2018, during a talk at the Economic Club of Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos revealed that, some thirty years ago, his Princeton classmate Yasantha Rajakarunanayake had defeated him in solving a mathematical problem, causing him to give up on his dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist.
20.
Jeff Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton's 11 eating clubs.
21.
Jeff Bezos had a 4.2 GPA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.
22.
Jeff Bezos first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.
23.
Jeff Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service.
24.
Jeff Bezos transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990.
25.
Jeff Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet.
26.
Jeff Bezos accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents as an investment in Amazon.
27.
Three years after Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering.
28.
However, the company continued to expand despite its losses, and in 2002, Jeff Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.
29.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos secured a $600-million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency on behalf of Amazon Web Services.
30.
Weeks later, Jeff Bezos recouped his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University indicated that Trump could do little to regulate Amazon in any meaningful way.
31.
On October 2,2018, Jeff Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase, which Sanders applauded.
32.
In February 2021, Jeff 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.
33.
Jeff Bezos announced that he intended to sell 50 million shares in Amazon over the next year.
34.
In September 2000, Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup.
35.
Jeff Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel and the development of human life in the Solar System.
36.
The 18-year-old Jeff Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion.
37.
In May 2013, Jeff Bezos met with Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Galactic, to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies.
38.
Jeff Bezos has been compared to Branson and Elon Musk as all three are billionaires who prioritize spaceflight among their business interests.
39.
In 2015, Jeff Bezos announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development and would make its first flight in the late-2010s.
40.
In 2016, Jeff Bezos allowed select journalists to visit, tour, and photograph his facility.
41.
Jeff Bezos has repeatedly called for increased inter-space energy and industrial manufacturing to decrease the negative costs associated with business-related pollution.
42.
Since 2016, Jeff Bezos has spoken more freely about his hopes to colonize the solar system, and has been selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to capitalize Blue Origin in an effort to support this endeavor.
43.
In May 2018, Jeff Bezos maintained that the primary goal of Blue Origin is to preserve the natural resources of Earth by making the human species multi-planetary.
44.
Jeff Bezos announced that New Shepard would begin transporting humans into sub-orbital space by November 2018.
45.
In July 2018, it was announced that Jeff Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person.
46.
Jeff Bezos launched nine days after Richard Branson launched on board the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission.
47.
In March 2014, Jeff Bezos made his first significant change at The Washington Post and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of a number of US local newspapers in Texas, Hawaii, and Minnesota.
48.
In January 2016, Jeff Bezos set out to reinvent the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software.
49.
Jeff Bezos makes personal investments through his venture capital vehicle, Jeff Bezos Expeditions.
50.
Jeff Bezos was one of the first shareholders in Google, when he invested $250,000 in 1998.
51.
Jeff Bezos invested in Unity Biotechnology, a life-extension research firm hoping to slow or stop the process of aging.
52.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos Expeditions funded the recovery of two Saturn V first-stage Rocketdyne F-1 engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
53.
Jeff Bezos has recruited prominent scientists such as Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, Steve Horvath, and Shinya Yamanaka.
54.
Jeff Bezos left stealth mode and launched on January 19,2022, with a start capital of $3 billion and an executive team led by Hal Barron.
55.
In 1999, Jeff Bezos was worth $10 billion yet drove a 1996 Honda Accord.
56.
Jeff Bezos was seen by some as needlessly quantitative and data-driven.
57.
Jeff Bezos has been characterized as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.
58.
Jeff Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money.
59.
Jeff Bezos 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.
60.
Jeff Bezos favored diverting Amazon profits back into the company in lieu of allocating it amongst shareholders in the form of dividends.
61.
Jeff Bezos believes that work and home life are interconnected, informing and calibrating each other.
62.
Since 1998, Jeff Bezos has published an annual letter for Amazon shareholders wherein he frequently refers to five principles: focus on customers, not competitors; take risks for market leadership; facilitate staff morale; build a company culture; and empower people.
63.
Jeff Bezos would continue to sporadically surpass Gates throughout the month of October 2017 after Amazon's share price fluctuated.
64.
Jeff Bezos is considered the first registered centi-billionaire.
65.
In 2019, Jeff Bezos's wealth was reduced by the divorce from his wife MacKenzie Jeff Bezos.
66.
Jeff Bezos retained his interest in The Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as voting control of the shares received by his ex-wife.
67.
Jeff Bezos had purchased three adjoining apartments at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan for $7.65 million in 1999; he bought a fourth unit in that building for $5.3 million in 2012.
68.
In February 2020, Jeff Bezos purchased the Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million, a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area.
69.
Jeff Bezos further expanded his residential holdings in February 2022, purchasing a $16.13-million-dollar apartment at a 24-story boutique condominium, located across from Madison Square Park in the Flatiron neighbourhood, where he already owns all the units on the top floors.
70.
Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Y721, a luxury superyacht estimated to cost more than $500,000,000; it is the largest yacht in the world.
71.
Jeff Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
72.
Jeff Bezos is known for creating an adversarial environment at Amazon, as well as insulting and verbally abusing his employees.
73.
In 2018, more than 400 Washington Post employees wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos criticizing his poor wages and benefits for his employees.
74.
In 2024, Jeff Bezos blocked the Washington Posts editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
75.
In January 2025, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the Post after it refused to run a satirical cartoon critical of the relationship between American billionaires and President Donald Trump, sparking conversations about the paper's ownership under Jeff Bezos; Telnaes called the decision "dangerous for a free press".
76.
In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the opinion section of the Post will give voice only to opinions that support "personal liberties" and "free markets", and that divergent opinions will not be published by the Post.
77.
David Shipley, The Posts opinion editor, resigned after trying to persuade Jeff Bezos to reconsider the new direction.
78.
Shaw in Manhattan, Jeff Bezos met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later.
79.
In March 2003, Jeff Bezos was a passenger in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas while surveying land to buy for Blue Origin; the other three occupants in the helicopter were pilot Charles "Cheater" Bella, Amazon lawyer Elizabeth Korrell, and local rancher Ty Holland.
80.
All survived; Jeff Bezos sustained only minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.
81.
Jeff Bezos portrayed a Starfleet official in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond, and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening.
82.
Subsequently, National Enquirer revealed that Jeff Bezos had an affair with media personality Lauren Sanchez; the affair with Sanchez had lasted for months.
83.
Later, Jeff Bezos published an online essay on February 7,2019, in which he accused American Media, Inc owner David Pecker of "extortion and blackmail" for threatening to publish intimate photos of Jeff 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.
84.
However, Jeff Bezos would keep all of the couple's voting rights.
85.
Jeff Bezos is the Honorary Chair of the Explorers Club.
86.
Jeff Bezos has supported Democrats US representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham, US senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues.
87.
Jeff Bezos donated $100,000 towards a movement against a Washington state income tax in 2010 for "top earners".
88.
Controversy over this was raised when General James Mattis accepted a headquarters tour invitation from Jeff Bezos and co-ordinated the deal through Sally Donnelly, a lobbyist who previously worked for Amazon.
89.
Jeff Bezos has been a resident of Indian Creek, Florida since 2023, which is near Trump's Mar-a-Lago.
90.
Jeff Bezos reportedly supported Trump to further his business interests, and supports many of Trump's policies.
91.
The Financial Times noted that Jeff Bezos had made other changes in his life, including stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021, focusing on Blue Origin, and being engaged to Lauren Sanchez, which may have changed his political views.
92.
In March 2018, Jeff Bezos met in Seattle with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.
93.
Jeff Bezos donated to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center several times between 2009 and 2017.
94.
In September 2018, Business Insider reported that Jeff Bezos was the only one of the top five billionaires 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.
95.
Multiple opinion columnists responded by asking Jeff Bezos to pay higher wages to Amazon warehouse workers.
96.
In June 2018, Jeff Bezos donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates aimed at promoting emissions-free energy.
97.
In February 2020, Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Jeff Bezos Earth Fund.
98.
In November 2021, Jeff Bezos pledged to donate $2 billion towards restructuring food systems and nature conservation at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
99.
In July 2021, Jeff Bezos announced the Courage and Civility Award and donated $100 million each to lawyer Van Jones and chef Jose Andres.
100.
Jeff Bezos Academy is a group of tuition-free preschools for students from low-income families, which was created by Jeff Bezos, and which operate in a manner similar to the Montessori method.
101.
On November 22,2022, Jeff Bezos awarded $123 million to organizations that are engaged in relocating homeless families to permanent housing.