Written by Ahmet Deniz YILMAZ• November 29, 2023• 9:11 pm• Entrepreneurship

Jeff Bezos, A Success Story: Amazon

HomeEntrepreneurshipJeff Bezos, A Success Story: Amazon

Have you heard the name Jeff Bezos before? He is the CEO of the world’s largest e-commerce website. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon.com, is an American entrepreneur. So what are the mysteries behind this name? Bezos, who has a key role in the development of e-commerce in the world, became the richest person in the world in 2018, surpassing Bill Gates, who has a fortune of $112 billion. According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos has regained the title of the richest man in the world, which he constantly changed with Elon Musk, as of March 2021. ($179.9 b.) Besides being the owner and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos also works on space tourism. So, who exactly is Jeff Bezos? We have researched the information about him in detail for you. Good reading.

Jeff Bezos’ Childhood

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in New Mexico, United States. Bezos’s father ran away when he was born. The names of Bezos’ parents are Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen (mother) and Ted Jorgensen. Anne Jacklyjn married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant petroleum engineer, when Jeff was 5 years old. He influenced his second father, Jeff, and as it turns out, Jeff took his surname from his second father. Jeff Bezos moved to Miami, Florida with his family when he was still young.

Jeff Bezos’ educational life was very successful. After graduating from River Oaks secondary school, he was enrolled in a high school for gifted and talented children. Bezos, who graduated from this high school as the top student, chose Princeton University, where Albert Einstein taught until the last days of his life. He also graduated from Princeton University, Department of Electrical and Computer Sciences, at the top of his class. Bezos spent his summers from the age of 4 to 16 on his grandfather’s farm in Texas. Jeff Bezos helped his grandfather by tending cattle and working as a tractor mechanic on that farm for more than 10 years.

As soon as Bezos received his university degree in May 1986, he started working at Fitel, a company that was looking for employees with Princeton graduates. Bezos was promoted to deputy director of technology and business development in February 1987. This 23-year-old man managed 12 employees working in the company’s New York and London offices and was responsible for the design, programming and testing phases. In April 1998, he started working at Bankers Trust Company, an investment bank on Wall Street, known as the center of the stock market. Exactly 10 months after his transfer to this bank, he became the youngest vice president in the bank’s history at the age of 26. Bezos, who changed many jobs in a few years, was hired as vice president of D.E. Shaw Hedge Fund before January 1991.

While working at this Fund, he married Mackenzie Scott, with whom he was married from 1993 until July 5, 2019. Jeff Bezos was elected vice president of the D.E. Shaw company at the age of 30, he suggested that the company’s first step on the internet should be book sales, but he resigned when his suggestion was not accepted.

How Amazon Founded?

After his resignation from the D.E. Fund company, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore. On July 5, 1994, he founded Amazon, one of the largest companies in e-commerce history, in his garage. Before founding his company, Bezos explored building it on land near San Francisco to avoid taxes. Later, he decided to establish the company in Seattle, Washington. At first, Jeff Bezos thought the name Cadabra was more appropriate for the company’s name, but later he thought that the name Amazon would make a difference in order to rise to the top in the alphabetical order. That’s why he named his company after the Amazon River, the largest river in the world. The reason why he chose this name is because he wants his company to be this big one day.

His family gave him exactly $300,000 to expand his business, and he invested all of that money into Amazon. Bezos told Amazon’s early investors that the company had a 70% chance of going bankrupt. Although Amazon is an online book shopping site, Jeff Bezos was planning to sell other types of products from the beginning. Exactly one month after Amazon’s launch, they had already sold books to 50 states and 45 different countries in the USA. However, book wholesalers were telling the Amazon team that if they were to buy one book, they had to buy at least 10, but Amazon didn’t have that much money in its budget. A few days later, employees found a loophole in this situation. They ordered one book of the book they needed and 9 copies of another book that was out of print and hard to fınd.

In the early days of Amazon, the servers used by the company required too much power, so fuses would blow even if a hair dryer was turned on at home. Founded in this way, Amazon expanded its product scale in the following years.

Jeff Bezos Acquires Washing Post

In addition, Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post newspaper and all its media outlets in 2013 for exactly 250 million dollars. Jeff Bezos the title of the richest man in the world, which he received from Bill Gates in 2018. With the rise of Tesla shares, Elon Musk obtained “the richest man in the world” title in 2020 and kept it for a long time. However, after announcing on social media that several of Tesla’s projects were postponed as of 2021, Elon Musk gave this title back to Jeff Bezos. After that period, the competition for that title lasted December 2021 with 340 billion dollars net worth. However, Elon Musk who lost 200 billion dollars between these dates, still holds that title in today’s date(November 2023)Although Amazon was founded as a shopping site, it includes many companies and websites. Twitch, a video game broadcasting platform, Alexa, which examines and tracks the world’s internet data graphs, IMDb, an internet movie database, and Goodreads, the address for readers and literature enthusiasts that match Amazon’s founding purpose, are all affiliated with Amazon.