Bezos Born: Amazon's Future Founder

Jeff Bezos drove across the country to Seattle typing the Amazon business plan on a laptop while his wife MacKenzie drove. It was 1994. He'd left a senior vice president position at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw on a Friday. He picked Seattle because Washington state had no income tax and a small population, which meant lower sales tax obligations for online sales. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 12, 1964, he was raised by his mother and stepfather, Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant. He graduated from Princeton with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and worked on Wall Street before the internet's commercial potential became obvious. He chose books as Amazon's first product because there were more individual titles in print than any other category of goods, and no single physical bookstore could stock them all. Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 a share. Wall Street analysts spent the next decade arguing about whether the company would ever turn a profit. Bezos ignored them. He reinvested every dollar into infrastructure: warehouses, delivery networks, server farms. Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006 as a way to sell the company's excess computing capacity, became the world's dominant cloud computing platform and the company's primary profit engine. The stock hit $3,500 in 2020. Bezos became the first person to have a net worth exceeding $200 billion. He acquired The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. He founded Blue Origin, a private space company, and flew to the edge of space on its New Shepard rocket in July 2021, eleven days after stepping down as Amazon CEO. Amazon now employs over 1.5 million people and delivers approximately 2.5 billion packages a year in the United States alone. The company transformed retail, publishing, cloud computing, and logistics. Its labor practices, tax strategies, and effect on small businesses remain subjects of intense debate. Bezos built the most consequential company of the internet era from a garage in Bellevue, Washington.