On January 12, 1964, Amazon entrepreneur and one of the world’s wealthiest persons Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His stepfather Miguel Bezos adopted him when he was a baby, and Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen became known as Bezos.
Education
Bezos received the National Merit Scholarship and the Silver Knight Award while a student at Miami Palmetto Senior High School in Florida. After that, he went to Princeton University to study electrical engineering and computer science. Bezos worked on several projects at Princeton, including a solar-powered car and a smart home he dubbed “The Bezos Expedition”. He also led the Princeton branch of SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) as its president. In the years after his 1986 Princeton diploma, Bezos held positions of increasing responsibility with financial institutions and technology companies like Fitel, Bankers Trust, and D. E. Shaw & Co. He started the online bookshop that would become Amazon in 1994, and it would go on to become the largest online retailer in the world. Bezos’s extraordinary success can be attributed in large part to his creative business strategies and his willingness to take calculated risks.
Early years and profession
Bezos founded the dream institute while still in high school to encourage young people to think creatively. Then, in 1990, he joined the New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. after a series of occupations after his summa cum laude (1986) graduation from Princeton University in electrical engineering and computer science. Bezos quickly rose through the ranks, becoming the company’s youngest senior vice president and being tasked with investigating Internet investment opportunities. The fact that annual Internet usage growth was above 2,000% ignited his entrepreneurial spirit. He left D.E. Shaw in 1994 and settled in Seattle, Washington, where he opened an online bookstore. Bezos started building the site’s software in his garage with a small team. Amazon, after a river in South America, made its first book sale in July 1995.
Overnight, Amazon surpassed every other online retailer. The site welcomed customer evaluations and offered discounts, tailored recommendations, and even helped track down out-of-print titles, all while being accessible around the clock. It started selling CDs in June of 1998, and DVDs followed in the fall. In 1999, Bezos expanded the site to include auctions and began funding other online retailers. After seeing Amazon’s success, several other stores, including large book chains, opened up virtual doors to their own customer bases.
Diversification of Amazon
Bezos recognized the need to diversify as more companies competed for Internet dollars, and by 2005, Amazon sold everything from consumer electronics to clothing to hardware. In 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing service that has since grown to become the largest of its kind in the world. In the same year, Amazon launched Amazon Studios to produce original television and film content. From 1995 to 1998, Amazon’s annual net sales grew from $510,000 to around $600 million. Then from 2008 to 2018, they jumped from more than $19.1 billion to nearly $233 billion. In approximately 2018 50% of the company’s operating profits came from AWS. After those two years, Amazon saw record profits, and its annual revenue topped $100 billion for the first time in the fourth quarter of that year. An increase in online purchases made from the comfort of home contributed to the record-breaking totals during the COVID-19 epidemic.
Bezos stated his intention to step away as CEO in February 2021. But he intended to keep his executive chairman position at Amazon.
Different actions
Bezos also started a space travel company called Blue Origin back in the year 2000. Soon after, Blue Origin purchased a launch site in Texas with the intention of debuting the New Shepard crewed suborbital spacecraft in 2018 and the New Glenn orbital launch vehicle in 2020. In 2013, Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post and related publications. In 2018, Bezos’s wealth was estimated at $112 billion, making him the richest person on the planet by a wide margin.
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