Jeff Bezos Biography: Birth, Age, Family, Education, Amazon, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and More About World's Richest Person

Founder, CEO, and President of the multi-national technology company Amazon, Jeff Bezos, becomes the first person ever to amass a $200 billion fortune. His current wealth is $90 billion more than Bill Gates, world's second-richest person and first-ever Centibillionare. Let us know more about the world's richest person in detail.

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Jeffrey Preston Bezos: Birth, Family, Education 

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born as Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen. At the time of his birth, his mother was only 17 years old and was a high school student while his father was a bike shop owner. In 1968, the couple got separated and his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos. Mike adopted four-year-old Jorgensen and the surname was then changed to Bezos. 

The family moved to Texas where Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Later on, the family moved to Miami, Florida where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School. During the breakfast shift, Bezos worked at McDonald's short-order line cook. In the year 1986, he graduated from summa cum laude from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) in electrical engineering and computer science. 

Jeffrey Preston Bezos: Career

Amazon

In 1986, he was offered a job at  Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, etc. In late 1993, Jeff left his job at D.E. Shaw and decided to establish an online bookstore. On July 5, 1994, he launched Cadabra from his garage which was later changed to Amazon. His parents invested $300,000 in Amazon. By the end of the year 1998, Bezos expanded Amazon to other products, initially launched as an online bookstore. In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks. In 2002, Amazon faced financial distress and in the year 2003, he rebounded from financial instability and gained a profit of $400 million. 

In 2007, Amazon launched Amazon Kindle. In 2013, he secured a $600 million contract with CIA on behalf of Amazon Web Services. In May 2016, Bezos sold more than a million share of his holdings for $671 million, the largest sum Bezos ever raised from selling his Amazon stock. The same year in August, he sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million. In July 2017, Jeff momentarily became the world's wealthiest person. The same year in November, his wealth surpassed $100 billion. On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial. On February 1, 2018, the company reported its highest-ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion. On March 6, 2018, Jeff was designated as the world's wealthiest person by Forbes with a net worth of $112 billion. 

Blue Origin 

In September 2000, Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin which is a human spaceflight startup company. Until 2006, the company purchased a large tract of land in West Texas for a launch and test facility. In 2011, the company's unmanned prototype vehicle crashed during a short-hop test flight. In May 2013, Jeff Bezos met the chairman of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies. 

In November 2015, the company launched the New Shepard space vehicle which reached its planned test altitude and returned back to the launch site in West Texas. 

The main aim of the Blue Origin is to preserve the natural resources of the Earth by making the human species multi-planetary. In July 2018, the company announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person. 

The Washington Post

On August 5, 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. In 2016, he reinvented the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software. Initially, Bezos was accused of controlling the content of the newspaper unfairly which was later dismissed by Bezos and the editorial board of The Washington Post. In 2016, for the first time since Bezos purchased the newspaper, the paper was profitable after a surge in online readership. 

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