Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist known as the founder, chairman, CEO, and president of Amazon – a multinational technology company that focuses in e-commerce, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
Early life and education
Jeffrey Bezos was born on the 12th of January 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother is Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and father, Ted Jorgensen. Jacklyn was a 17-year-old high school student at the time of his birth, and his father, Ted, was a bike owner.
After his mother divorced Ted, she married Miguel “Mike” Bezos, a Cuban immigrant in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted the four-year-old Jeffrey and changed his surname to Bezos.
The family transferred to Houston, Texas, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon after he obtained a degree from the University of New Mexico. Bezos studied in River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School after the family moved to Miami, Florida. At the University of Florida, he attended the Student Science Training Program. He was the high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. In 1986, he graduated with an average grade of 4.2 from Princeton University, and Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was also nominated to Tau Beta Pi while at Princeton and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.
Career
In 1986, after Bezos graduated from Princeton, he was proposed jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was assigned with building a network for international trade. Bezos was then promoted to head of development and director of customer service. From 1988 to 1990, he transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. In 1990, he merged a newly started hedge fund, D.E. Shaw & Co, and worked until 1994. Bezos became the fourth Senior Vice-President of D.E. Shaw & Co at the age of 30.
Amazon
In late 1993, Bezos decided to start an online bookstore and resigned at D.E. Shaw. He founded the Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994. Bezos labeled his newly founded company, Amazon after the Amazon River in South America. He informed many of his early depositors that there was a possibility that Amazon would fail. Though it was initially an online bookstore, he had always planned to inflate his business to other products. After three years, he took it publicly with an initial public offering. Bezos maintained that the growth of the internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.
In 1998, Bezos expanded into online sale of video and music; by the end of the year, he had also multiplied his products to include a different variety of consumer goods. Bezos used the $54 million raised during the 1997 company’s equity, offering to finance the aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors. In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to open Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from website traffic and weather channels. In late 2002, rapid expending from Amazon caused its financial distress when revenues stagnated. In 2000, Bezos loaned $2 billion from banks, as its cash balances immersed to only $350 million.
He closed distribution centers and lay off 14% of the Amazon workforce after the company closely went bankrupt. In 2003, Amazon recovered from financial instability and turned revenue of $400 million. In 2007 of November, Bezos started the Amazon Kindle. According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos desired to create the same emanate state found in video game simulations in books; he wished readers would fully participate with books. In 2013, Bezos obtained a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services. Amazon was known as the largest leading online shopping retailer in the world in October of that year. Bezos sold somewhat more than one million stocks of his holdings in the company for $671 million, the largest sum he had ever produced from selling some of his Amazon stock in May 2016. On August 4, 2016, Bezos marketed another million of his shares for $756.7 million. A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new staffs when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers. By January 19, 2018, his Amazon stock holdings had valued to a little over $109 billion; months later he began to sell stock to increase cash for other enterprises, in particular, Blue Origin. On January 29, 2018, he was included in Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial. On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion. Due to the growth of Alibaba in China, Bezos has often voiced interest in expanding Amazon into India.
Bezos dispatched the Amazon’s global senior vice president, Amit Agarwal to India with $5.5 billion to confine jobs all through the company’s stock chain routes in March 2018. Later in the month, U.S. President Donald Trump suspected Amazon–and Bezos, specifically–of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices. Amazon’s share price fell by 9% in response to the President’s negative comments; this brings down Bezos’s personal wealth by $10.7 billion. Weeks later, Bezos regained his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University specified that Trump could do little to control Amazon in any meaningful way. During July 2018, a number of associates of the U.S. Congress called on Bezos to point the applications of Amazon’s face recognition software, Rekognition. Additionally, the statements by the Trump administration, in favor of reversing the antitrust law known as the Paramount Decree, have been anticipated to aid Amazon to acquire the Landmark Theaters chain.
Criticism of Amazon’s business practices remained in September 2018 when Senator Bernie Sanders presented the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act and accused Amazon of getting corporate welfare. This followed disclosures by the non-profit group New Food Economy which found that one-third of Amazon workers in Arizona, and one-tenth of Amazon workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, depend on food stamps. Sanders’s efforts provoked a response from Amazon which pointed to the 130,000 jobs it created in 2017 and called the $28,446 figure for its median salary “misleading” as it included part-time workers. However, Sanders opposed that the companies targeted by his proposal have cited an increased focus on part-time workers to escape benefit obligations. On October 2, 2018, Bezos proclaimed a company-wide wage increase which Sanders applauded. The American workers who were being paid the minimum wage had this raised to $15 per hour — a decision that was interpreted as support for the Fight for $15 movement.