Jeffrey Preston Bezos Biography

Jeff Bezos

Born: January 12, 1964

Education: Princeton University (BSE)

Occupation: Entrepreneur | Media proprietor |Investor | Computer engineer

Years active: From 1986

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, computer engineer, and commercial astronaut.

He is the founder, executive chairman and former president and CEO of Amazon.

With a net worth of around US$159 billion as of August 2022, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021 according to both Bloomberg's Billionaires Index and Forbes.

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Amazon

Amazon is founded in late 1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a 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, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.

To the space

In September 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup. Bezos has long expressed an interest in space travel and the development of human life in the Solar System. His 1982 high school valedictorian senior graduation speech was followed up with a Miami Herald interview in which he expressed an interest to build and develop hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for human beings who were in orbit. The 18-year-old Bezos stated that he wanted to preserve Earth from overuse through resource depletion. Rob Meyerson led Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017 and served as its first president.

On July 20, 2021, he launched on the NS-16 mission with his half-brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. He launched nine days after Richard Branson launched onboard The Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission.

The Washington Post

On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash, at the suggestion of his friend, Don Graham. To execute the sale, he established limited liability company Nash Holdings to serve as a holding company through which he would own the newspaper. The sale closed on October 1, 2013, and Nash Holdings took control.

In March 2014, Bezos made his first significant change at The Washington Post and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of a number of U.S. local newspapers in Texas, Hawaii, and Minnesota.

In January 2016, Bezos set out to reinvent the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software. Throughout the early years of ownership, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the paper. Bezos and the newspaper's editorial board have dismissed accusations that he unfairly controlled the paper's content and Bezos maintains the paper's independence.

After a surge in online readership in 2016, the paper was profitable for the first time since Bezos made the purchase in 2013.