Jeff Bezos, then 30, was the youngest vice-president of DE Shaw & Co. He left Wall Street where he had been making hundreds of thousands of dollars a yearly, to open Amazon in Seattle. He is now constantly trying to become the richest man on the planet. At the end of July, he was able to surpass Bill Gates by achieving that position thanks to an increase in Amazon shares.
He claims that Alexa, the virtual assistant, was inspired by pop culture references. In fact, he even appeared in Star Trek: Beyond as an alien. Amazon was set to become MakeItSo.com using the same phrase Captain Picard used in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
He is seen with Mark Cuban (playing them), and hanging out at the Billionaires Camp with fellow billionaire, Mr. Burns.
Bezos’s obsession with NASA’s Mercury, Apollo and Space Programs goes so far that he funded and led an underwater expedition to recover Apollo project rockets.
Blue Origin was founded by him in 2002. It is a company that specializes in space tourism. He had already expressed his desire to be a space entrepreneur as a child, decades before.
This CEO won’t be up at night.
Brad Stone’s biography of the CEO, The Dream Store: Jeff Bezos & the Amazon Era, states that he used a screwdriver to disassemble his crib when he was taking his first steps. He wanted to sleep in a bed and not in it.
Barnes & Noble will likely not take comfort in the fact that Bezos used to visit his Bellevue, Washington store when he was busy building Amazon.
His stepfather Miguel Bezos adopted him when he was a young boy. Jeff and Mackenzie have four children: three boys and one adopted Chinese-American daughter.
He spent his summers on the ranch of his maternal grandfather in Texas until he was an adult. There he did odd jobs like windmill repairmen. His grandfather, who worked in space technology for Darpa, was the director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Albuquerque (New Mexico) in the 1950s.
He was a teenager who worked in a McDonald’s restaurant and then started a summer camp for elementary school students, the DREAM Institute.
He made it a point to visit the Grand Canyon of Colorado while on his trip to Seattle to start Amazon.
We can see his Wired profile from the late 1990s that he had high standards for the women he would like to date. He stated that his number one criteria was to find a woman who could rescue him from a Third World prison.
He donated $ 15,000,000 to the university to help build a neurological research center.
It’s not surprising that Bezos is an avid reader. Kazuo Ishiguro’s What remains of the Day is his favorite novel.
