Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( BAY-zohss; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman, and the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes, he was the world's wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, and in 2026 his net worth was approximately US$284 billion.
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, and raised in Houston and Miami. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in engineering. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. He founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000, and he flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021. He purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions.
The first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index, Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018 (equivalent to $190,000,000,000 in 2025). On July 5, 2021, Bezos took over the role of executive chairman and stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon, succeeded by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.
Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn (née Gise) (1946–2025) and Ted Jorgensen (1944–2015). At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19. Ted was a Danish American unicyclist born in Chicago to a family of Baptists. After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school, bringing her baby with her. Jeff attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was two.
Ted struggled with alcohol and with his finances. Jacklyn left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was 17 months old. After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted 4-year-old Jeff, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos. Jacklyn, her husband, and her son left the area and asked Ted to discontinue contact, to which he agreed.
After Mike received his degree from the University of New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon. Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Jeff's maternal grandfather was 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 his grandson would spend many summers in his youth and which he would later purchase and expand from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 160,000 acres (64,750 ha). Jeff displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School. In high school, he worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.
Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. In his graduation speech, Bezos spoke about the possibility of human space colonization. A local newspaper quoted him as saying that he hoped humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space while preserving Earth as "a huge national park".
After graduating from high school in 1982, Bezos attended Princeton University. He initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science. In 2018, during a talk at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Bezos revealed that, some thirty years ago, his Princeton classmate Yasantha Rajakarunanayake had defeated him in solving a mathematical problem, causing him to give up on his dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist.
Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton's 11 eating clubs. Additionally, he was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). He had a 4.2 GPA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), summa cum laude.
After Bezos graduated from college in 1986, he was offered positions at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a financial technology telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990. From 1990 to 1994, he worked at D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modeling. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice president by age 30.
In spring 1994, Bezos read that web usage was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year and eventually decided to establish an online bookstore. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, left their jobs at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. Bezos led the company's early development while MacKenzie Scott handled bookkeeping, financial administration, and some of Amazon's early freight negotiations during its startup phase. Before choosing Seattle as Amazon's headquarters, Bezos reportedly explored locating the company on a Native American reservation near San Francisco, partly because of potential tax advantages.
Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter A, which is at the beginning of the alphabet. At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with "A" would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches. In addition, he regarded "Amazon," the name of the world's largest river, as fitting for what he hoped would become the world's largest online bookstore. He accepted an estimated $300,000 (equivalent to $700,000 in 2025) from his parents as an investment in Amazon. He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt. Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products. Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it public with an initial public offering (IPO). In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the internet would overtake competition from larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.
In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company's product offerings to include a variety of other consumer goods. Bezos used funds raised during the company's 1997 equity offering (equivalent to $110,000,000 in 2025) to finance the acquisition of smaller internet companies during the dot-com expansion period. Among these acquisitions were a purchase of a majority stake in Pets.com in 1999 and a purchase of a portion of Kozmo.com for $60 million (equivalent to $120,000,000 in 2025), both of which failed after the dot-com bubble collapse in 2000. By the end of 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks (equivalent to $3,700,000,000 in 2025), as Amazon's cash balances dipped to only $350 million (equivalent to $650,000,000 in 2025). However, the company continued to expand despite its losses, and in 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic. Revenues stagnated later that year, and after the company nearly went bankrupt, Bezos closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce. In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $35 million (equivalent to $61,000,000 in 2025).