Background

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and father Ted Jorgensen, a bike shop owner and Chicago native. At the time of her son's birth, Jacklyn was a seventeen-year-old high school student. After Jacklyn divorced Ted, she married Miguel "Mike" Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike Bezos adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose surname was then changed to Bezos. The family moved to Houston, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he received a degree from the University of New Mexico.

Bezos was the maternal grandson of Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque. Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers in his youth. Bezos would later purchase this ranch, and grow it from 25,000 acres (101 km2 or 39 miles2) to 300,000 acres (1,214 km2 or 468 miles2). His maternal grandmother was Mattie Louise Gise (née Strait), through whom he is a cousin of country singer George Strait.

Education

Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. He would spend summers at the ranch working on enormously varied tasks such as laying pipe, fixing windmills, vaccinating cattle, and other farm work. His grandfather, Lawrence Gise, was a huge role model in his life, with this wide-ranging knowledge of science and constant presence on the ranch. In a 2010 commencement speech, Jeff told graduates that his grandfather taught him how “it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

The family eventually moved to Florida and Jeff was transferred to Miami Palmetto Senior High School where he excelled at his studies and realized his love for computers. He was even invited to participate in the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, where he won a Silver Knight Award in 1982 and was a National Merit Scholar. Bezos graduated as the school’s valedictorian, and a National Merit Scholar, securing his spot at Princeton University.

Bezos planned to study physics at Princeton University, but he soon decided to return to his love of computers. He graduated with two Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University. “Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress,” Bezos told Guardian, commenting on his decision.

Career

After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. It was there he became the company's youngest vice president in 1990. While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Bezos set up the office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a two-bedroom house, equipped with three Sun Microstations, and eventually developed a test site. After inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American River, on July 16, 1995.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned. Amazon.com went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early '90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

In 2006, Amazon.com launched its video on demand service; initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video. In 2007, the company released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections. That same year, Bezos announced his investment in Blue Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company that develops technologies to offer space travel to paying customers.

Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company's next generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money. "We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price," Bezos said, according to ABC News.

Bezos made headlines worldwide on August 5, 2013, when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million. The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company's chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth.

"The Post could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future," Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. "But we wanted to do more than survive. I'm not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success."

In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones—remote-controlled machines that can perform an array of human tasks—to provide delivery services to customers. According to Bezos, these drones are able to carry items weighing up to five pounds, and are capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center. He also stated that Prime Air could become a reality within as little as four or five years.

Bezos oversaw one of Amazon's few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014; criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year. However, Bezos did score a victory with the development of original content through Amazon Studios. After premiering several new programs in 2013, Amazon hit it big in 2014 with the critically acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle. In 2015, the company produced and released Spike Lee's Chi-Raq as its first original feature film.

In July 2017, Bezos briefly surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg, before dropping back to No. 2. The Amazon chief then reclaimed the top spot in October, and in January 2018, Bloomberg pegged his net worth at $105.1 billion, making him the richest person in history. Two months later, Bezos was up to $127 billion, equal to the combined wealth of 2.3 million average Americans, before continuing his surge to the $150 billion plateau in mid-July.

On January 30, 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase delivered a joint press release in which they announced plans to pool their resources to form a new healthcare company for their U.S. employees. According to the release, the company will be "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction for patients, with an initial focus on technology solutions. "The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," said Bezos. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort."

Not long afterward, The Seattle Times reported that more changes were afoot for Amazon, with the company consolidating its consumer retail operations in order to focus on Alexa, AWS, digital entertainment and other growing areas. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the news, saying, "As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others."

In April 2018, as part of his annual shareholder letter, Bezos said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. He added that 2017 had been an outstanding year for hardware sales, and that Amazon would continue to invest in expanding its customer base, brand and infrastructure.

Achievements

• 

  Jeff Bezos is an American technology entrepreneur and founder of e-commerce giant Amazon.com. He founded Amazon.com, an online book store, and later introduced features including one-click shopping, customer reviews, and e-mail order verification. He expanded it to include various other items including clothes, CDs, toys, jewellery, watches, electronics and shoes. He has constantly been improving his web site, and introducing improved facilities for his customers. His childhood dream of space travel spurred the founding of Blue Origin, an aerospace company that is developing technologies to offer space travel to customers. Bloomberg Billionaires Index listed Bezos as one of the wealthiest people in the world with an estimated net worth of $28 billion.
  
  In 1999, Bezos received his first major award when Time named him Person of the Year. In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune. He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of The Business Council for 2011 and 2012. In 2014, he was ranked the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.
  
  He has also figured in Fortune's list of 50 great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015. In September 2016, Bezos received a $250,000 prize for winning the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, which he donated to the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. In March 2018, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin. He received Germany's 2018 Axel Springer Award for Business Innovation and Social Responsibility. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in their 2018 listing.

Works

More photos

• design

  • Amazon.com
  • Kindle (1st Generation) 2007
  • Kindle (2nd Generation) 2009
  • Kindle DX (2nd Generation) 2009
  • Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) 2010
  • Kindle Touch (4th Generation) 2011
  • Kindle (5th Generation) 2011
  • Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation) 2012
  • Kindle Paperwhite (6th Generation) 2013
  • Kindle (7th Generation) 2014
  • Kindle Voyage (7th Generation) 2014
  • Kindle Paperwhite (7th Generation) 2015
  • Kindle Oasis (8th Generation) 2016
  • Kindle (8th Generation) 2016
  • Kindle Oasis (9th Generation) 2017

Religion

The American billionaire, investor, philanthropist, computer scientist and entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos is Christian by religion. But he respects all types of religion and never tries to dominate others.

Politics

According to public campaign finance records, Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S. Senators from Washington. He has also supported U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Spencer Abraham, U.S. Senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues.

Bezos donated $100,000 towards a movement against a higher Washington state income tax in 2010. In 2012, he donated to Amazon's political action committee (PAC), which has given $56,000 and $74,500 to Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

After the 2016 presidential election, Bezos was invited to join Donald Trump's Defense Innovation Board, an advisory council to improve the technology used by the Defense Department. Bezos declined the offer without further comment. Trump has alluded to potential conflicts of interest between Bezos's business interests. He accused Bezos of avoiding corporate taxes, gaining undue political influence, and undermining his presidency by spreading fake news. Bezos has repeatedly joked about using his rocket company to send Donald Trump into outer space.

Views

He is an advocate of the LGBTQ movement and supported the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Quotations: “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”

“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about Amazon:

On Amazon’s big ideas: “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”

On being different + better: “One of the things we don’t do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it’s very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it…the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What’s the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don’t want to just do things because we can do them…we don’t want to be redundant.”

On always charging less: “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”

On novelty: “What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.”

On profitability: “We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us, or we wouldn’t be in this business.”

On customer-focus: “If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word-of-mouth is so very, very powerful.”

Jeff Bezos quotes on doing business:

On knowledge: “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”

On competition: “Your margin is my opportunity.”

On value creation vs advertising:

“The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”

On fact-based decision-making: “The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”

On the Benefits of Market Leadership: “Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.”

On culture: “Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.”

About history: “The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.”

On inverting questions: “The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?'”

On online scale: “On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.”

On advertising (industry): “I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.”

On advertising (your business): “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

On Long-termism: “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.”

On novelty: “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last."

On obsessiveness: ”The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

On hosting customers daily: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

On customer service: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

On aging customers: “If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.”

On being competitor-focused vs customer-focused: “If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

On pricing: “I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.”

“Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.”

“You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about Evil:

On banks: “The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about Innovation:

On the anti-fragility of innovation: “Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”

On frugality: “I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”

On being misunderstood: “I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

On growing a business: “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.”

On experiments: “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.”

On uncertainty: “If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”

On serendipity: “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”

On stubbornness and flexibility: “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about life (and prioritization):

On resourcefulness: “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”

On working for others: “I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.”

On regrets: “The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a ‘regret minimization framework’. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”

Jeff bezos quotes about the long-term:

On long-term thinking and invention: “I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.”

On long-termism in life: “Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people — and I’m just not one of them — believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.”

On getting long-term minded people: “If you’re very clear to the outside world that you’re taking a long-term approach, then people can self-select in.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about motivation:

On product missionaries: “I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.”

On changing the world: “I want to see good financial returns, but also to me there’s the extra psychic return of having my creativity and technological vision bear fruit and change the world in a positive way.”

Membership

While at Princeton, he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He was also elected to Tau Beta Pi and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial pathway for human space flight".

He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 

  Phi Beta Kappa

• 

  Tau Beta Pi

• 

  Students for the Exploration and Development of Space

• 

  National Academy of Engineering

  February, 2018

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Personality

Bezos is known for his double-personality that turns him from a kind person into a rough executive inducing fear and respect in his employees. A hyper-intelligent, ultra-driven individual, he expects everyone around him to behave likewise. Amazon staff are said to be living in fear of his abrasive flare-ups, including “Why are you wasting my life?” and “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Jeff Bezos seems to have no problem running the company while still personally reading feedback from customers. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information,” senior Amazon vice president Jeff Wilke explains. When there is a real issue, the consequences can be harsh on the employees responsible for the issue. There is an official system within Amazon that ranks the severities of its internal emergencies. A Sev-5 would be a relatively standard problem that engineers solve all the time while a Sev-1 is an urgent issue that gets everyone on their toes as it requires an immediate response. There is another level of severity that has employees sweating just at the sight of it. Informally dubbed by the employees, the “Sev-B” is anyone’s greatest nightmare at Amazon. Sev-B means when an employee receives an email directly from Jeff Bezos containing the notorious question mark. When a someone receives it, it basically has an effect of a ticking time-bomb. They drop everything they’re doing and give full attention to the issue that the CEO is highlighting. Within a few hours, the employee has to prepare a formal thorough explanation of how the problem occurred to a team leads who will have to review the report before sending it to Bezos. It is the company’s way to ensure that the customer’s voice is always heard inside Amazon.

Bezos always moves faster, makes his employees work harder, and pursues both significant innovations and small ones. The superb image for Amazon is not just the everything store, but ultimately the everything company. The future has many things in store for Amazon. They still haven’t achieved next-day or even same-day delivery for Prime members and they are still set to expand their grocery service Amazon Fresh beyond Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Jeff Bezos expects Amazon’s mass expansion to as many of countries as possible. Also, wants their customers to eliminate the need to buy products from manufacturers, by using 3D printer technologies to manufacture their own and so on.

It is unknown whether Jeff Bezos’s wild ideas and an active imagination are rooted in his early love for science fiction or it is just his personality trait. Bezos is known for thinking outside the box, re-shaping the box, or tossing it in the trash altogether. From revolutionizing the way we buy and read books, to creating a private spaceflight company aimed for the people, to launching a plan for the use of drones in package delivery, Bezos always challenges the norm. He believes that breaking away from the pack and making these extraordinary decisions is what truly leads to innovation. It is the sole element that all successful leaders seem to possess. Jeff Bezos will only get bigger, and his innovations wilder until either he decides to stop, or there is no one left to stop him.

Jeff Bezos life story shows that he achieved all his success thanks to his strong desire to learn new technologies, hard work and, of course, thanks to his disctintive leadership qualities.

Unlike Steve Jobs, who would eat the same thing for breakfast everyday in order to “pare down decisions,” Bezos has made an effort to keep it fresh. There is one story of Bezos ordering Mediterranean octopus with bacon and garlic yogurt for breakfast in order to better understand another CEO, who he eventually bought out.

Regimented morning routines aren’t for everyone, and Bezos is a strong supporter of letting the morning come naturally. That’s why he doesn’t schedule early-morning meetings and prefers to spend time with his loved ones.

Physical Characteristics: Height - 5 ft 7.5 in (171.5 cm)

Weight - 70 kg (154 lbs)

Hair Color - Dark Brown (he lost almost all his hair before middle age)

Eye Color - Hazel

Distinctive Features: cleft Chin and asymmetrical eyes.

He has a signature style of laughing, which was also one of his features that his wife was attracted to when she started working in the space adjoining his office in 1992.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Bezos is a serial innovator: with Amazon, he changed the way the retail industry works; and now he’s applying that same spark of creativity to media, with his ownership of the Washington Post and the founding of Amazon Studios. Still, for me it is his zeal for helping humanity return to the moon, settle Mars and reach destinations beyond that is the most thrilling." - Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, discussing the inclusion of Bezos in Time magazine's list of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World 2017."

Interests

• Bezos’ hobby is so elite, expensive and niche that it makes sense only he’s known for it. When given the opportunity, he spends time combing the oceans for discarded NASA rocket ships.
  
  Because most of the rocket ship detaches from space shuttles mid-flight, there’s no safe place to discard the rocket boosters, except over the ocean. Bezos has turned this into his hobby, working with teams in submarines (sometimes bringing along his family) to retrieve these historic relics. He once spent three weeks on a single underwater rocket hunt.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Kazuo Ishiguro

• Politicians

  Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell

• Writers

  Bezos started his first business at school. It was called The Dream Institute, and it was an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. There were some books that Bezos required his participants to read. They were: The Lord of the Rings novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, Dune novel by Frank Herbert, Stranger in a Strange Land novel by Robert A. Heinlein, The Once and Future King novel by T. H. White, Watership Down novel by Richard Adams, Black Beauty novel by Anna Sewell, Gulliver’s Travels book by Jonathan Swift, David Copperfield novel by Charles Dickens, and Treasure Island novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, along with the plays Our Town by Thornton Wilder and The Matchmaker by John B. Keane and Thornton Wilder.
  
  The Amazon founder and CEO also has an abiding love of reading, and it has played a key role in forming him as a leader. In biography "The Everything Store," author Brad Stone describes how books shaped Bezos' leadership style and way of thinking. In fact, according to the book, there is a list of books Amazon employees refer to as "Jeff's Reading List." It includes autobiographies, business and technology reads and even a novel, and according to Stone, many Amazon executives have made their way through these volumes. His favorite books are: "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro, "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" by Jim Collins, "Creation: Life and How to Make It" by Steve Grand, "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don't" by Jim Collins, "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen, "Sam Walton: Made in America" by Sam Walton, "Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation" by James Womack and Daniel Jones, "Memos from the Chairman" by Alan Greenberg, "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvements" by Eliyahu Goldratt, "Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know" by Mark Jeffery and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb.

• Artists

  In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb.

• Sport & Clubs

  Golf and Tennis

• Music & Bands

  Favorite music: Zac Brown Band, country music
  
  Unlike most of the great minds on this list, Jeff Bezos was not a music lover. In fact, it has been revealed that Bezos has “a lack of interest in music of any kind.” As a teenager, Jeff memorized the call letters of local radio stations so he could fake his knowledgeability to the music scene. He let Steve Jobs hire away his music editor, Keith Moerer, ultimately letting Moere and Jobs seize the lead in creating the iPod. However, Bezos has not given up on music just yet; he revealed in an interview with Billboard in February that he believes voice-activated home devices like Amazon Echo is the “next gigantic growth area” for the music industry. While he is definitely passionate about the potential of the music industry and streaming, not much is known about his actual taste in music other than that he’s a fan of “Americana,” the Amazon music station that his business partner Steve Boom is in charge of and that he’s a fan of the Zac Brown Band.

Connections

In 1992, Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan when he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle. MacKenzie was a research associate at the firm and they married a year later. In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. He and his wife are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.

Mother:

Jacklyn Bezos

Jacklyn is Jeff Bezos’ mother, who married Ted Jorgensen when she was just sixteen. The marriage lasted just one year. After that, she married Mike Bezos, who was a Cuban Immigrant, when he was 15 years old. He worked his way to University of Albuquerque and then moved ahead adopting Jeff.

biological father:

Ted Jorgensen

Jeff Bezos’ biological father is Ted Jorgensen. He had abandoned his wife and Jeff Bezos when he was three. At the time when he married his mother, he was a hard-drinking 18-year-old circus performer.

stepfather:

Miguel Bezos

Adoptive father of Jeff Bezos, Mike has been a constant inspiration for Jeff. He got married to Jacklyn, his mother when Jeff was four. Mike Bezos was a Cuban immigrant, who moved to USA just a few months back.

Wife:

MacKenzie S. Bezos

(née Tuttle; born April 7, 1970)

She is an American novelist. In 2014, Bezos founded the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution, where she serves as executive director.

Brother:

Mark Bezos

Sister:

Christina Bezos

Son:

Prezton Bezos

colleague:

Steve Jobs

(February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)

He was an American entrepreneur and business magnate.

colleague:

Elon Musk

(born June 28, 1971)

He is a business magnate, investor and engineer.

References

• Jeff Bezos: The Force Behind the Brand: Insight and Analysis into the Life and Accomplishments of the Richest Man on the Planet
• The Amazing Amazon: How Jeff Bezos Built An Insane e-Commerce Empire
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
• First Mover: Jeff Bezos In His Own Words (In Their Own Words series)
• One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
• Think Like Jeff Bezos: 23 Life Changing Lessons from Jeff Bezos on Life, People, Business, Technology, and Leadership: Making of an E-Commerce Business Mammoth from Yesterday for Tomorrow
• Jeff Bezos - Success Principles for Life and Work
• Jeff Bezos: Founder of Amazon.com
• Jeff Bezos (Founder and CEO of Amazon)
• Learn from the Experts: Jeff Bezos
• Jeff Bezos (Tech Icons)
• Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos: Building 2 Valuable brands in America - 50 Life changing lessons from them on Life, People, Business, Technology & Leadership(2 manuscripts)
• Jeff Bezos: Business Executive And Founder Of Amazon.com (Ferguson Career Biographies)
• Jeff Bezos and Amazon (Internet Biographies)
• Jeff Bezos (Technology Pioneers)
• Jeff Bezos: Amazon and the eBook Revolution (Titans of Fortune)