$2T Market Cap · 1.5M Employees · 310M Customers · 1 Laugh
Born January 12, 1964 · Albuquerque, New Mexico
He left a Wall Street hedge fund at thirty to sell books out of his garage. His business plan was to lose money for as long as possible. Wall Street called him insane. Twenty years later, Amazon was worth more than the entire retail industry combined.
Five acts. Three decades. One philosophy: it's always Day One.
A Princeton grad who built a quantitative hedge fund on Wall Street — then quit to sell books in a garage.
Born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque, adopted at age four by Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos. Jeff spent summers on his grandfather's ranch in Texas, fixing windmills and castrating bulls. He graduated valedictorian from Palmetto High School in Miami, then summa cum laude from Princeton in electrical engineering and computer science. At D.E. Shaw, the quantitative hedge fund, he became the youngest senior VP in the firm's history. In 1994, he discovered that web usage was growing at 2,300% per year. He made a list of twenty products he could sell online. Books won. He drove to Seattle, writing the business plan in the car while his wife MacKenzie drove.
Amazon's business plan was simple: lose money until everyone else was dead. Wall Street thought it was suicide. It was strategy.
Amazon launched on July 16, 1995. Within 30 days, it had sold books in all 50 states and 45 countries. Bezos went public in 1997 at $18 per share and immediately told shareholders: "This is Day One." He meant it. Amazon reinvested every dollar into growth — free shipping, distribution centers, expanding into music, DVDs, electronics, and everything else. The dot-com crash hit in 2000. Amazon's stock dropped 94%, from $107 to $6. Analysts wrote obituaries. Bezos held firm. "We're not profitable yet because we're investing in the future." The future arrived.
He accidentally built the infrastructure of the internet. Then he realized that was the real business.
Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 as a side project — renting out Amazon's excess server capacity. It became the most important product in cloud computing. AWS now generates $90 billion in annual revenue and runs a third of the internet. Amazon Prime launched in 2005 — $79/year for free two-day shipping. Critics said it was economically insane. It was. It was also the greatest customer loyalty program ever designed. Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013 — pocket change — and returned it to profitability. The Kindle, Alexa, Amazon Studios. Everything was a platform.
He stepped down as CEO, flew to space, and turned his attention to the long game: Blue Origin and beyond.
In 2019, Bezos and MacKenzie Scott announced their divorce — the most expensive in history at $38 billion. In 2021, he stepped down as Amazon CEO, handing the reins to Andy Jassy. On July 20, 2021, he flew to space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, wearing a cowboy hat and laughing his famous laugh. Blue Origin is building New Glenn, a heavy-lift orbital rocket to compete with SpaceX. He bought a $500 million yacht. He's dating Lauren Sanchez. The man who built the everything store is now building rockets, because the only thing bigger than the internet is space.
Partners, rivals, critics, and the people who shaped the everything store.
He built the most convenient shopping experience ever. The question is what it cost.
First-person accounts, industry analyses, fact-checks, and scene pitches from 267 contributors.
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