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Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964 , Albuquerque ) is the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Bezos, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University, worked as a financial analyst for D. E. Shaw & Co. before founding Amazon in 1994. He was TIME magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.
It is not entirely obvious, but Bezos is pronounced Bay-zose. Charlie Rose pronounced it this way, while interviewing him on November 20, 2007
Early life
Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico. His mother's ancestors were settlers in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos's maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent most summers of his youth, working with his grandfather at the enormously varied tasks essential to the operation. At an early age, he displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. When a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver.
Bezos was born when his mother, Jackie Bezos, was still in her teens. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Bezos was five. Bezos's stepfather, Miguel Bezos, was born in Cuba; he migrated to the United States alone at age 15 and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Bezos's mother, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary in Houston from the 4th to 6th grades.
Bezos showed intense and varied scientific interests at an early age. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and maintain his secrecy. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for his science projects. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. He entered Princeton University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.
Career
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After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. Later on Bezos also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co..
Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, and became one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs. In 2004, he founded a human spaceflight startup company called Blue Origin.
Bezos also has a personal investment company called Bezos Expeditions. It has invested in companies such as 37signals , MFG.com , , ChaCha Search and Pelago.
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Artificial artificial intelligence (AAI) is a term coined by Jeff Bezos. Certain computational tasks, such as identifying whether a person in a photograph is male or female, are tasks that humans still do better and faster than computers. If perfect artificial intelligence systems existed, computer programs could complete those tasks. The idea of artificial artificial intelligence is to outsource those parts of a computer program to humans.(A similar principle is used when unsuspecting internet surfers decode (and thus defeat) CAPTCHAs to help Spambots.) AAI is the underlying principle behind Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Estimated wealth
His wealth is primarily derived from his holding of Amazon.com stock; at the end of 2006 he held just over 100 million shares of common stock, representing 24.26% of all Amazon.com shares (in 1998 he held 41% of all shares). In the same year his salary was $81,840 (unchanged since 1998), with $1.1 million in other benefits.
According to Forbes list of the World's Wealthiest People:
- 1999 – $10.1 billion, ranked no. 19
- 2000 – $6.0 billion, ranked no. 23
- 2001 – $2.0 billion, ranked no. 234
- 2002 – $1.5 billion, ranked no. 293
- 2003 – $2.5 billion, ranked no. 147
- 2004 – $5.1 billion, ranked no. 82
- 2005 – $4.8 billion, ranked no. 41
- 2006 – $4.3 billion, ranked no. 147 (shared with others)
- 2007 – $8.7 billion, ranked no. 35
Quotes
- "I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online."
- "I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is never trying."
- "I think it's always hard to know why you're drawn to a particular thing. I think part of it is, if you have a facility with that thing, of course it's satisfying to do it and so in a way that's self-reinforcing."
- "We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun."
Trivia
- Bezos attended a Montessori school as a child.
- Attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School.
- Bezos chose the domain name Amazon.com after watching a documentary that mentioned that the Amazon River was not merely bigger than all other rivers on earth, but ten times bigger than even the next largest. The company had been called "Cadabra Inc." until that point.
- Amazon.com shares jumped 40% on Wednesday and Thursday April 25 and 26 2007 respectively, generating a potential profit for Bezos of $1.8 billion in 2 days.
See also
References
- http://www.businessweek.com/1998/50/b3608008.htm
- http://mpsh.dadeschools.net
- http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests_in_37signals.php
- http://www.mfg.com
- http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/09/01/8384899/index.htm
- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/technology/01search.html
- http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/108617.asp
- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Stream.html
- http://www.forbes.com/maserati/billionaires2004/LIRRYMV.html?passListId=10&passYear=2004&passListType=Person&uniqueId=RYMV&datatype=Person
External links
- Time Magazine's 1999 "Person of the Year" Profile
- Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos - Fastcompany.com (August 2004)
| Preceded byBill Clinton and Kenneth Starr | Time's Person of the Year 1999 |
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