Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American internet and aerospace entrepreneur, media proprietor, and investor. He is best known as the founder and former CEO of Amazon.com, Inc. The first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, Bezos was named the “richest man in modern history” after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In September 2018, Forbes described him as “far richer than anyone else on the planet” as he added $1.8 billion to his worth when Amazon became the second company in history to have a market cap of $1 trillion.

Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He founded the online retailer Amazon in late 1994 on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world’s largest online sales company, the largest internet company by revenue, as well as the world’s largest provider of AI assistance and cloud infrastructure services via its Amazon Web Services arm.

Bezos added to his business interests when he founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. A Blue Origin test flight successfully first reached space in 2015, and the company has plans to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight in 2019. He purchased major American newspaper publisher The Washington Post in 2013 for US$250 million in cash, and manages his other businesses and investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions.