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Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (/beɪzəs/, born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.
[edit] Early life and careerBezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen.[2] His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km2 or 39 miles2) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him.[3] At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.[4] Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos. Miguel was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old, worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married, and legally adopted Jeff. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."[5] Bezos often showed intense scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for science projects.[citation needed] The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982.[6] He was high school valedictorian.[7] He attended Princeton University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science. According to Nick Hanauer (an early investor in Amazon) and "others who know [him]"[5], Bezos is a libertarian; such beliefs are said to have help motivate Amazon.com's aggressive "efforts to avoid collecting sales taxes on purchases made on its website" and the company's unwillingness to engage in "sponsorships, matching grants or employee volunteer programs".[5] [edit] Business careerAfter graduating from Princeton University in 1986, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field.[8] Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. He next worked at Bankers Trust, where he became vice-president. Later on he also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co. [edit] Amazon.comBezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage.[9] He had left his "well-paying job" at a New York City hedge fund when he "learned about the rapid growth in Internet use", which coincided with a "then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling [that] online retailers don't have to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence"; he had headed to Washington's because its relatively small population meant fewer of his future customers would have to pay sales tax.[5] Amazon eventually made him one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs and a billionaire. Bezos' salary as CEO was $81,840 in 2010, in addition to the $1.6 million cost of his personal security detail.[10] He owns 20% of Amazon's stock and forgoes stock options. According to Forbes, Amazon's shares have "defied gravity" in 2011, jumping 55% and adding $6.5 billion to his net worth.[11] Bezos is known for his attention to business details. As described by Portfolio.com, he "is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager. ... an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases."[9] [edit] Blue OriginIn 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company,[12] partially as a result of his fascination with space travel,[13] including an early interest in developing "space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth."[7] The company was kept under wraps for a half dozen years and initially became publicly known only in 2006 when purchasing a sizable aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility.[14] In a 2011 interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help enable "anybody to go into space" and stated that the company is committed to decreasing the cost and increasing the safety of spaceflight.[15] Blue Origin is "one of several start-ups aiming to open up space travel to paying customers. Like Amazon, the company is secretive, but [in September 2011] revealed that it had lost an unmanned prototype vehicle during a short-hop test flight. Although this was a setback, the announcement of the loss revealed for the first time just how far Blue Origin’s team had advanced."[13] Bezos said that the crash was 'not the outcome that any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard.'" [13] [edit] RecognitionHe was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.[16] In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders.[17] Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. [18] He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.[19] [edit] References
[edit] External links
SOURCE: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: 05/17/12, 12:56 pm ImagesYoutube VideosPost your comments and links about Jeff Bezos |
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