Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos
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 my guidance, Amazon became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.
Biography
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January 12, 1964
Was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Early career
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1986
Graduated college.
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1988 to 1990
Product manager at Bankers Trust.
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1990 to 1994
Joined D. E. Shaw & Co , a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling. Became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.
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Amazon
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July 5, 1994
Left my job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in my garage.
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1998
Diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company's products to include a variety of other consumer goods..
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2000
Borrowed $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million.
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2002
Led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.
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In late 2002
Rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when revenues stagnated.
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2003
Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million.
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2013
Secured a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)on behalf of Amazon Web Services.
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In May 2016
Sold slightly more than one million shares of my holdings in the company for $671 million, the largest sum I ever raised from selling some of his Amazon stock.
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On August 4, 2016
Sold another million of my shares for $756.7 million.
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January 19, 2018
My Amazon stock holdings had appreciated to slightly over $109 billion; months later I began to sell stock to raise cash for other enterprises, in particular, Blue Origin.
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March 6, 2018
Was formally designated the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes with a net worth of $112 billion.
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Blue Origin Details coming
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2000
Founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup.
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2006
Purchased a large tract of land in West Texas for a launch and test facility.
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2011
One of the company's unmanned prototype vehicles crashed during a short-hop test flight.
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2015
Announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development and would make its first flight in the late-2010s.
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2017
New Shepard successfully flew and landed dummy passengers, amending and pushing its human space travel start date into late 2018.
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May 5, 2021
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Personal life
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1992
Was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan when I met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm.
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1993
Married MacKenzie Tuttle.
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1994
Moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where I founded Amazon.
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March 2003
Was one of three passengers in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas after the craft's tail boom hit a tree.
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2016
Played a Starfleet official in the movie Star Trek Beyond.
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January 9, 2019
I announced on Twitter that I intend to divorce after a "long period" of separation.
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April 4, 2019
The divorce was finalized, with me keeping 75% of the couple's Amazon stock and MacKenzie getting the remaining 25% ($35.6 billion) in Amazon stock. However, I would keep all of the couple's voting rights.
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February 7, 2019
I published an online essay in which I accused American Media, Inc. owner David Pecker of "extortion and blackmail" for threatening to publish intimate photos of me and Lauren Sánchez.
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