Who is Jeff Bezos?
Key Points
Early Life
Bezos grew up in Miami and Houston. He schooled at River Oaks Elementary school from grade four to grade six. Amazingly, Bezos started being explorative at a tender age.
For instance, during his holidays, he would spend time at the ranch fixing windmills, laying pipes, vaccinating cattle, and engaging in any other ranch-related activity available at a particular time. Jeff’s grandfather, Lawrence Gise, significantly influenced him. Bezos looked up to his grandfather as his role model, and from him, he learned basic Science.
Bezos established the Dream Institute as an educational summer holiday camp for grade four to grade six pupils. This became Bezos’ first business. Additionally, he required his participants to read particular books while at the camp.
Some of these include; The Lord of the Rings, authored by J.Tolkien, the Dune written by Frank Herbert, and the Stranger in a Strange Land authored by Robert Heinlein. Later, when Bezos’ family moved to Florida, Jeff transferred to Palmetto Senior High School. Here, like at his former school, Bezos performed excellently and gradually developed a passion for computers.
After his senior school, Bezos joined Princeton University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering in 1986. At the same time, Bezos’ early life is a little confusing. His biological parents are Née Gise and Ted Jorgensen.
Born to teenage parents, Bezos had quite a rough childhood as his parents raised him while struggling to manage education and parenthood. Bezos’ parents divorced at some point, and his mother remarried. His mother’s new lover, Miguel Bezos, soon adopted Bezos at age four and changed Bezos’ surname from Jorgensen to Bezos.
Career
While still a senior school student, Bezos worked as a short-order line chef at McDonald’s, where he prepared breakfast. Bezos also attended a science training program designed for students at the University of Florida. During the training, Bezos was a high school valedictorian.
Bezos also became a National Merit Scholar, and in 1982, he won the Silver Knight Award. While giving a graduation speech, Bezos hinted to the audience that he intended to colonize space. His cooking career allowed him to join the Quadrangle Club, an eating club at Princeton.
Simultaneously, he joined Phi Beta Kappa, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space president at Princeton. Bezos later in 1990 joined the New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. His excellence earned him the position of the senior vice president despite his young age.
While at this firm, Bezos examined the possible internet investments. At the time, internet usage grew by over 2,000 annually, which aroused his entrepreneurial interests the most. In 1994, Bezos quit working for the firm and relocated to Seattle, Washington, where he opened a virtual bookstore, and he constantly invented newer things from then on.
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Blue Origin
Blue Origin operated behind the scenes until 2006 when it bought a vast tract of land to launch its inventions and test its spaceship machinery. Sadly, in 2011, Blue Origin’s crewless prototype vehicle crashed while flying. This accident did not discourage Bezos, and in 2015, the company once again introduced a new space car that passed all the tests, got to the intended latitude, and returned to the test field at West Texas.
Encouraged by this great success, Bezos declared that the price of a commercial spacelift car would be between $200,000 to $300,000 per head.
The Washington Post
While The Washington Post is not his brainchild, Bezos bought the company in 2013 at $250 million. In 2016, he regenerated the company into a technology and media company. Bezos reworked its mobile platforms, digital media, and expansion strategies, taking the company to its highest glory.
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What Jeff Bezos Known For?
Besides his ever-growing net worth, Jeff Bezos is also known for some inventions. Some of these inventions include:
Bezos 10,000-Year Clock
Bezos has invented and is currently building his 10,000-year clock to ascertain time for the next 10000 years. This clock only ticks once annually and chimes once in a millennium, and will need a big storage house. Bezos presumes that this clock will be 500ft tall and will use thermal cycles to operate.
Bezos Patented Airbag System for Phones
The US Patent and Trademark Office in 2012 awarded Bezos the patent for a smartphone airbag system. This system has an inbuilt accelerometer that is fast at detecting whether your smartphone is failing too fast. Upon realizing that your phone is dying, this system automatically deploys an airbag to prevent further damage.
Bezos Solar Cooker
During his childhood, Bezos invented a solar cooker which did not become incredible as he intended.
Jeff Bezos: Marriage, Divorce, Children, and Personal Life
Net Worth
Bezos’s net worth keeps changing daily. For instance, according to Forbes, on 10th October 2021, Bezos’s net worth was $191.7B. This is still Bezos’ net worth on 11th October 2021.
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Marriage Life
Bezos met his former wife at MacKenzie, at D.E, where they both worked. While Bezos was the company’s vice president, his wife Mackenzie was one of the company’s research associates. Bezos then married his wife in 1993, and the two have been together for the last twenty-five years.
Bezos’ wife has been supportive throughout all his investments and unique inventions like the yacht, and she is glad she has watched Bezos become the world’s second-richest person. She has a height of five feet and is also a famous novelist. Jeff recalls being the first person to interview his wife for a research associate position at D.E.
The two are alumni of Princeton University. Interestingly, after landing the job, Mackenzie became Bezos’ office neighbor, where he would overhear her laughing. Their love story began here as Jeff recounts falling in love with Mackenzie’s great laughter.
Divorce
While Bezos’ net worth reduced significantly, Mackenzie’s net worth increased, placing her on the top list of the richest women in the world.
Children
Together with his ex-wife, Bezos has four children; three of them being boys and of the children being a girl. They got their firstborn son in 2000.
Also, the mother and the father have an equal 50/50 custody of the four children.
Jeff Bezos: Awards and Achievements
The Axel Springer Award
Bezos won this award in 2018 for being very entrepreneurial and impacting others positively. The award givers recognized the charity work Bezos and Mackenzie did in 2018 when they donated a $33 million scholarship grant.
Recipients used the grant to purchase immigrants without documents to the United States as children. Besides, the award was also a celebration of Bezos Blue Origin, which intends to make the space more habitable by a more significant number of people.
The James Smithson Medal
The National Air and Space Museum featured Jeff Bezos as a speaker, after which it honored him with the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. This organization applauded Bezos for being a featured speaker at John H. Glenn Lecture Space.
Jeff Bezos Published Works and Books
Jeff Bezos is a great author who inspires people to try to chase their dreams instead of fearing to fail and failing to try. He has authored several books, some of which are available on Google reads. Some of these books include:
Invent and Wander
The book also contains chapters on how people can practically apply machine learning and artificial intelligence. The author dedicates an entire chapter to Bezos’s explanation of buying the Washington Post in the book. Finally, the must-take home lessons from this collection are Bezos’s success hunting character traits.
The author describes Bezos as having a unique childlike sense of wonder, being multidisciplinary, incorporating humanities and sciences into his inventions, being curious and passionate has a philosophy of social liberalism and entrepreneurial capitalism.
The Man Who Sells Everything
This book talks about the life of Jeff Bezos and how he has continuously quenched his thirst for exploration and invention. The book has a dedicated chapter on what features entrepreneurs ought to have. Bezos, in this book, reveals that passion drives him and explains how success happens because of timing and luck.
Jeff Bezos Quotes
Bezos is a highly influential individual that inspires the world with his wise quotes. Some of his common quotes are:
- “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” Jeff Bezos“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” Jeff BezosJeff Bezos“We see our customers as guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Jeff Bezos“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tailwind is now a headwind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.”Jeff Bezos
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