Jeff Bezos

Early life and education: Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico; his mother was a teenager at his birth and his parents later divorced, after which his mother married Miguel 'Mike' Bezos who adopted him. Bezos showed an early interest in computers and engineering, graduated as valedictorian from Miami Palmetto Senior High School, and in 1986 graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Wall Street and founding Amazon: After Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in several roles, including at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he became the firm's youngest senior vice president and was tasked with exploring Internet business opportunities; he left in 1994 to found an online bookstore after recognizing rapid growth in web usage. He and his then-wife moved to Seattle, and Bezos launched Amazon.com from a garage in July 1995; within months the site was selling across the United States and internationally. Growth of Amazon and innovations: Under Bezos’s leadership Amazon expanded beyond books into a vast retail marketplace, pioneered features such as one-click ordering and customer reviews, invested heavily in logistics and fulfillment centers, launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) which became the dominant cloud infrastructure provider, and scaled to become the largest online retailer in revenue and market influence. Amazon went public in 1997 and continued aggressive reinvestment and expansion across retail, devices (Kindle, Echo), media (Prime Video), and enterprise services (AWS). Blue Origin, media ownership, later role changes: Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to develop lower-cost access to space and later funded it in part through stock sales; in 2013 he purchased The Washington Post as a private owner. In 2021 Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO and became executive chair to focus on other ventures including Blue Origin and philanthropic initiatives, while Amazon continued to expand under new leadership.