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Jeff Bezos
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Jeff Bezos  Actions

American entrepreneur
Also known as: Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Written and fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: May 19, 2023 • Article History

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Recent News
May 19, 2023, 1:46 PM ET (AP)
NASA picks Bezos' Blue Origin to build lunar landers
for moonwalkers
Jeff Bezos' rocket company has won a NASA contract to land
astronauts on the moon, two years after losing out to SpaceX

Top Questions

Who is Jeff Bezos? 

Jeff Bezos 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, an online retailer. In 2020 he
had a net worth of more than $180 billion.

How did Jeff Bezos start Amazon? 

Jeff Bezos quit his job at an investment bank

in 1994 and moved to Seattle, Washington, to
open a virtual bookstore. Working out of his
garage with a handful of employees, Bezos
began developing the software for the site,
which he called Amazon.com. It sold its first
book in 1995.

Where was Jeff Bezos born? 

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New

Mexico, on January 12, 1964. He was raised
largely in Houston, Texas, and moved to
Miami, Florida, as a teenager.

Was Jeff Bezos born rich? 

Jeff Bezos was not born into a wealthy family.

His parents were 17 and 18 years old when he
was born, and he worked on his maternal
grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla, Texas, early in
his life. He graduated summa cum laude from
Princeton University in 1986, with degrees in
electrical engineering and computer science.

What was Jeff Bezos’s first job? 

As a teenager, Jeff Bezos got his first job at a

McDonald’s restaurant, where he was a fry
cook. His salary was less than $3 per hour.
After graduating from Princeton University,
he worked at Fitel, an international trade
start-up.

Summary

Read a brief summary of this topic 

Jeff Bezos , byname of Jeffrey Preston

Bezos, (born January 12, 1964, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, U.S.), 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
became the largest retailer on the World Wide
Web and the model for Internet sales.

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Jeff Bezos

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Born: January 12, 1964 (age 59) • Albuquerque •

New Mexico

Founder: Amazon.com • Blue Origin

Notable Family Members: son of Miguel ("Mike")

Bezos • son of Jacklyn ("Jackie") Bezos • son of
Ted Jorgensen • married to Mackenzie Scott…
...(Show more)

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Early life and career

Jeff Bezos

While still in high school, Bezos developed the

Dream Institute, a centre that promoted
creative thinking in young students. After
graduating (1986) summa cum laude from
Princeton University with degrees in electrical
engineering and computer science, he
undertook a series of jobs before joining the
New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in
1990. Soon named senior vice president—the
firm’s youngest—Bezos was in charge of
examining the investment possibilities of the
Internet. Its enormous potential—Web usage
was growing by more than 2,000 percent a
year—sparked his entrepreneurial
imagination. In 1994 he quit D.E. Shaw and
moved to Seattle, Washington, to open a
virtual bookstore. Working out of his garage
with a handful of employees, Bezos began
developing the software for the site. Named
after the South American river, Amazon sold
its first book in July 1995.

Amazon.com

Jeff Bezos

Amazon quickly became the leader in e-

commerce. Open 24 hours a day, the site was
user-friendly, encouraging browsers to post
their own reviews of books and offering
discounts, personalized recommendations,
and searches for out-of-print books. In June
1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it
added videos. In 1999 Bezos added auctions to
the site and invested in other virtual stores.
The success of Amazon encouraged other
retailers, including major book chains, to
establish online stores.

As more companies battled for Internet

dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and
by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of
products, including consumer electronics,
apparel, and hardware. Amazon diversified
even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon
Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing
service that eventually became the largest such
service in the world. In late 2007 Amazon
released a new handheld reading device called
the Kindle, a digital book reader with wireless
Internet connectivity, enabling customers to
purchase, download, read, and store a vast
selection of books on demand. Amazon
announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books
had surpassed those of hardcover books. That
same year Amazon moved into making its own
television shows and movies with its Amazon
Studios division. Amazon’s yearly net sales
increased from $510,000 in 1995 to some
$600 million in 1998 and from more than
$19.1 billion in 2008 to almost $233 billion in
2018. About half of the company’s operating
income in 2018 was derived from AWS. Two
years later Amazon registered record profits,
and its revenue in the fourth quarter that year
surpassed $100 billion for the first time. The
unprecedented numbers were, in part, caused
by a rise in home shopping during the COVID-
19 pandemic.

In February 2021 Bezos announced that he

would be stepping down as CEO later that
year. However, he planned to remain at
Amazon as executive chairman.

Other activities
Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a
spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000.
Blue Origin bought a launch site in Texas soon
thereafter and planned to introduce a crewed
suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard, in 2018
and an orbital launch vehicle, New Glenn, in
2020. Bezos bought The Washington Post and
affiliated publications for $250 million in
2013. Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018
at $112 billion, making him the richest person
in the world.

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Personal life
In 1993 Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle,
whom he had met at D.E. Shaw. The couple
announced in January 2019 that they were
divorcing, and the following day the National
Enquirer printed a story revealing that Bezos
was having an affair with another woman.
Bezos subsequently launched an investigation
into how the tabloid had obtained his private
text messages. Then, in February, he posted a
lengthy essay online in which he accused
officials at American Media Inc. (AMI), the
parent company of the Enquirer, of “extortion
and bribery” for suggesting that they would
release nude photographs of Bezos if he did
not stop his inquiry, amid other demands. The
Bezos-led investigation later alleged that his
lover’s brother had leaked the texts.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated

by Adam Augustyn.

Home  Lifestyles & Social Issues  Education

Princeton University  Actions

university, Princeton, New Jersey,
United States
Also known as: College of New Jersey
Written and fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Article History

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Princeton University, coeducational,

privately endowed institution of higher
learning at Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. It was
founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746,
making it the fourth oldest institution of
higher education in the United States.

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Notable Alumni: Woodrow Wilson • Henry Norris

Russell • Cornel West • Paul Volcker • Gresham M.
Sykes

Related People: Woodrow Wilson • Christina H.

Paxson • John Witherspoon • Jonathan Dickinson •
Jonathan Belcher

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Alexander Hall on the campus of Princeton

University, Princeton, N.J.

It was in Princeton’s Nassau Hall in 1783 that

General George Washington received the
formal thanks of the Continental Congress for
his conduct of the American Revolution. Two
U.S. presidents—James Madison and
Woodrow Wilson—graduated from Princeton,
and Wilson served as president of the
university from 1902 to 1910. The school’s
name was changed to Princeton University in
1896, and its graduate school was opened in
1900. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had left
Princeton without a degree, did much to
popularize the institution’s image as a bastion
of upper-class male privilege. Since 1969 the
university has admitted women. Enrollment is
approximately 7,000.

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College savings plans: Why an early
start can pay off

Exterior of the Princeton University Art

Museum, Princeton, N.J.

In addition to a college and a graduate school,

Princeton has a School of Engineering and
Applied Science (1921) and a School of
Architecture (1919). The university’s Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs continues a long Princeton tradition of
furnishing government officials. The Princeton
Plasma Physics Laboratory (1951) is one of the
foremost research centres on nuclear fusion,
while the renowned Institute for Advanced
Study (1930), associated with the university
but independent of it, is where Albert Einstein
spent the last two decades of his life. The
Princeton University Art Museum maintains
an extensive collection.

This article was most recently revised and updated

by Michael Ray.

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