Jeff Bezos, the second-richest man alive, turned 61 years old on Sunday.
Since his youth in New Mexico, Bezos has gone through college, founded several companies — you may have heard of a few of them — and knocked milestone after milestone in the dust. Here’s a (brief) account of some major events in the life of the 236-billion-dollar man.
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as Jeffrey Jorgensen; his last name would formally be changed to Bezos after his mother married Miguel Bezos in 1968, who adopted him.
He’d go on to graduate with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University. After college, Bezos worked for financial tech start-up Fitel and later Bankers Trust before joining hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co in 1990. It was at D.E. Shaw that he met future philanthropist and Amazon (AMZN) co-founder MacKenzie Scott, who he married in 1993.
Both Bezos and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, left D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle in July 1994 as part of an endeavor that would later become Amazon. The company officially launched on July 5 of that year out of the Bezos’ garage under the name “Cadabra,” as in “abracadabra.” It was later changed because it sounded too much like “cadaver,” or a dead human body used for research.
The Bezos’ also registered the domain names Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com, and Relentless.com; the latter still redirects users to Amazon when typed into a browser. Amazon.com was registered in November 1994 after Bezos began researching a new name, finding inspiration in the largest rainforest on the planet, which is now severely threatened by deforestation and climate change.
Amazon, the company, launched its ubiquitous website one year later, becoming an online bookstore that delivered to 45 countries.
Amazon was listed on the Nasdaq on May 15, 1997, offering 3 million shares at an initial $18 per share.
“Although the company has yet to produce net profit, several analysts say…they expect the company to rake in revenue in the multimillion-dollar range within a few years,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
A year later, the company would expand beyond selling just books and CDs, including clothing and groceries. At the time, the New York Times labeled Amazon “the most successful merchant on the Internet,” which would only prove to be increasingly accurate over the next 27 years.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, inspired by the 1999 film October Sky and his early-age ideas of humanity evacuating the Earth for life among the stars. The company’s goal is to facilitate human travel to space through new, ultra high-tech rocket ships.
Amazon launched its express shipping subscription, Amazon Prime, for a price of $79 per year during its 2004 fourth-quarter earnings report.
“Amazon Prime is ‘all-you-can-eat’ express shipping,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement at the time (February 2005). “Though expensive for the Company in the short-term, it’s a significant benefit and more convenient for customers.”
The offering didn’t become widely popular until years later, reaching over 100 million subscribers in 2018. Prime would also inspire the company’s biggest sales day of the year, “Prime Day,” which saw shoppers spend a total of $14.2 billion last July. A follow-up event in October saw shoppers save more than $1 billion in deals offered for Prime members, according to the company.
Besides Prime, the 2000s was a major decade for Amazon. It saw the launch of Amazon Web Services, the ebook device Kindle, the company’s music division, and a few acquisitions.
Bezos, in August 2023, purchased the Washington Post from its parent corporation for $250 million in cash — just a week after selling 614,938 shares of Amazon stock for roughly $185 million. That deal gave one of the U.S.’s wealthiest men control of one of its biggest newspapers.
At the time, Bezos was focused on recreating the “daily ritual” of reading the Post as a bundled newspaper, not just a handful of stories, the Post reported. He also promised hands-off management that kept the newspaper’s seasoned veterans in charge of editorial matters (although he’s since been more involved).
“I don’t feel the need to have an opinion on every issue,” Bezos said in a meeting with staff. “I’m sure I don’t know much about things like Syria and foreign entanglements. I’m happy to let the experts opine on that.”
The billionaire recently waded into Post matters to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and lay off around 100 people.
Amazon bought Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion in June as it looked to gain a stronger foothold in the grocery market, offering $42 in cash for each share. The move marked its largest acquisition to date and was completed just two months later.
On July 27, 2017, Jeff Bezos briefly became the richest person alive, dethroning Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bill Gates. At the time, Amazon’s shares had surged, bringing the value of his fortune to $91 billion, nudging past Gates’ $90 billion net worth. The stock would shed some of those gains later, giving Gates back his spot.
Later that year, he became the first person after Gates — who did so in 1999 — to achieve a $100 billion net worth.
In hindsight, $100 billion may not seem like such a milestone, at least compared to the events that’ve followed. As of writing, Bezos is worth just shy of $234 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time ranking of the wealthiest people alive. Gates is left behind in 16th place, with a $103.3 billion fortune.
On January 9, 2019, Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott Bezos announced they would be divorcing after 25 years of marriage.
“As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we’ve decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” they wrote in a note posted to social media.
The divorce was completed that April. Scott agreed to give Bezos her interest in The Washington Post and Blue Origin, along with 75% of their ownership of Amazon and voting control of her remaining shares. That left Scott with 25% of their stock, which at the time was the equivalent to $38 billion. Since then, she’s engaged in annual rounds of giving to nonprofits, donating more than $17 billion as of March.
In 2018, shortly before Bezos filed for divorce, the billionaire began his relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a former media personality and founder of Black Ops Aviation, an aerial film and production company. Bezos and Sánchez got engaged in May 2023 and currently split their time between Miami and Los Angeles.
According to NewsNation, they expect to get married in Italy later this year. An earlier report from The Daily Mail suggested they would get married late last December in a $600 million wedding in Colorado. Bezos later commented that the “whole thing is completely false,” referring to that report.
In July 2021, Jeff Bezos announced he would step down as CEO of Amazon at the end of the year and become its executive chair. In his last letter to Amazon’s shareholders as CEO, Bezos talked about the company’s employees and customers, as well as biology, death, democracy, and tyranny.
“We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to ‘be yourself.’ What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness,” Bezos wrote. “The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”
“Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously,” he added.
In later interviews, Bezos cited a desire to work on Blue Origin as a major reason for his stepping down as CEO. In December 2023, he told podcaster Lex Fridman that “most of my time is spent on Blue Origin, and I’m so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years.”
Also that July, Bezos — accompanied by his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — flew into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket to mark the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He was actually the second billionaire to travel to space that month, with Virgin Galactic’s (SPCE) Richard Branson launching into space nine days earlier.
“The most profound piece of it, for me, was looking out at the Earth, and looking at the Earth’s atmosphere,” Bezos said at the time. He also told reporters he’d be splitting his time primarily between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund, which is dedicated to sustainability and fighting climate change.
Blue Origin had planned to launch its long-awaited New Glenn vehicle, a partially reusable 322-foot rocket with two stages, last week before it was delayed due to weather concerns. As of writing, the megarocket is scheduled to launch no earlier than Monday morning, giving the company’s founder a very rare — and a tad late — birthday present.
It’s been a long time coming. Blue Origin has spent the last eight or so years working on New Glenn’s maiden voyage. The vehicle is expected to be one of only a handful of rivals to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its yet-to-be-tested Starship megarocket.
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