When Jeff Bezos , CEO of Amazon, was a child, he spent his summer vacation in South Texas on his maternal grandfather’s farm. The grandfather was a naval officer who had worked in the development of the hydrogen bomb in the Atomic Energy Commission. From him Bezos learned to be self-sufficient. “If you are in the middle of nowhere, in a rural area, when something goes wrong you don’t pick up the phone and call someone. You start fixing it yourself “. These words are the greatest teaching of the grandfather from what the entrepreneur tells in the memoirs of him Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings with the introduction by Walter Isaacson.
Bezos remembers those holidays fondly. With her grandfather she sterilized and vaccinated the animals, fixed the windmills, repaired the pipes. It was in that period that her curiosity for the “‘self-made-man” was born.
Almost three decades into the Amazon adventure, which started in her garage and became a global business empire, Bezos has announced that she will step down as CEO but will remain president. He will be replaced by Andy Jassy , head of the Amazon Web Services unit and one of his closest associates.
His intention is not to retire, but to focus on other businesses, such as space travel projects, and the philanthropic initiatives of the Day One Fund and the Bezos Earth Fund, to which he made a donation of $ 10 billion in 2020.
Last year was particularly lucky for Bezos. His fortune has increased, leading him to replace Tesla founder Elon Musk as the richest person in the world. According to Forbes magazine, Bezos’ fortune is approximately $ 181.5 billion.
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964, the entrepreneur was born when his mom, Jacklyn Gise (Jackie), was 17. His father, Ted Jorgensen, worked in a circus and had problems with alcohol. The two separated when little Jeff was just one year old. Four years later, his mother got married again to Miguel Bezos , an immigrant from Cuba, who teaches him courage and determination. Indeed, it is he who considers as a father.
At school he was never the top of the class, on the contrary, he was the third or fourth best. And he came to Princeton University with the aim of studying physics, but he had to settle for a degree in Electronic Engineering. Among his early jobs is a job in New York in an investment fund that exploited algorithms on the financial market.
A lover of science fiction and space travel tales, as a child he passionately followed Star Trek. And it is thanks to the Enterprise ship of the series that the idea of Alexa, the smart speaker, was born.
The father of Amazon is passionate about the so-called “customer service” because customers are never satisfied and this pushes him to do more and more. In an interview, Bezos said that Amazon’s value lies in that obsession with the customer, not the obsession with the competition: “Because if you are obsessed with competitors and lead the market, you may be tempted to slow down while watching others behind you ”.
The idea of founding Amazon came with the birth of the internet. When in 1994 Bezos began to see the boom of the network (it was growing at a rate of 2300% per year), intuition led him to think of an online store to sell books. There were over 3 billion books in the world, but a bookstore couldn’t have more than 100,000 titles.
Thus, in July 1995, with an initial investment of $ 100,000 (it was his savings and those of his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott ), Amazon was born. Then came the financial contribution of his parents, who believed in the project.
The Bezos couple moved to Seattle because it was there, in the Oregon town of Roseburg, where the largest book store was located. And once you have learned the trick of online sales and started diversifying products, from vitamins to household appliances.
He initially wanted to baptize the site “Cadabra” from the magic word “abracadabra”. But then he preferred the name of the longest river on earth. A bit like his online shop.
