Jeff Bezos

Infobox Person
name = Jeffrey Preston Bezos

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caption = Jeff Bezos 2005
birth_date = birth date and age|1964|1|12
birth_place = Albuquerque, New Mexico
networth = gain

US$8.2 billion (2008)
occupation = Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) 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 named "Time" magazine's Person of the Year in 1999. [ [http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,992927,00.html "Person of the Year" profile] , "Time"]

Biography

Bezos' maternal ancestors were settlers from Greece who lived 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 tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver. [ [http://www.businessweek.com/1998/50/b3608008.htm 12/14/98 THE TORRENT OF ENERGY BEHIND AMAZON ] ]

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 privacy. 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. [ [http://mpsh.dadeschools.net Palmetto Sr. High School ] ] While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida; which helped him receive a Silver Knight Award in 1982. [ [http://www.silverknightawards.com/dade_winners.html Miami-Dade Silver Knight Awards Winners] ] 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. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

Career

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 after making a cross country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way and setting up the original company in his garage [ [http://www.portfolio.com/resources/executive-profiles/Jeffrey-P-Bezos-1984 Top Executive Profiles - Jeffrey P. Bezos - Portfolio.com ] ] , his work with Amazon eventually led him to become one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs. In 2004, he founded a human spaceflight startup company called Blue Origin.

Bezos is known for his attention to business process details, and is also said to have a very distinctive honk-like laugh. [ [http://www.portfolio.com/resources/executive-profiles/Jeffrey-P-Bezos-1984 Top Executive Profiles - Jeffrey P. Bezos - Portfolio.com ] ]

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. [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Stream.html Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans - New York Times ] ] AAI is the underlying principle behind Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Estimated wealth

Bezos' wealth is primarily derived from his holding of Amazon.com stock; in 1998 he held 41 percent of Amazon.com stock but by the end of 2006 he held just over 100 million shares of common stock, representing 24.26 percent of all Amazon.com shares. Bezos receives a modest salary of US$81,840 (with benefits of US$1.1 million), which has remained unchanged since 1998. [cite news | author= | title=World's Richest People: Jeffrey Bezos | url=http://www.forbes.com/maserati/billionaires2004/LIRRYMV.html?passListId=10&passYear=2004&passListType=Person&uniqueId=RYMV&datatype=Person | work=Forbes | date=6 February 2004 | accessdate=2008-02-13]

* 1999 – US$10.1 billion, no. 19
* 2000 – US$6.0 billion, no. 23
* 2001 – US$2.0 billion, no. 234
* 2002 – US$1.5 billion, no. 293
* 2003 – US$2.5 billion, no. 147
* 2004 – US$5.1 billion, no. 82
* 2005 – US$4.8 billion, no. 41
* 2006 – US$4.3 billion, no. 147
* 2007 – US$4.4 billion, no. 188
* 2008 – US$8.2 billion, no. 110

References

External links

* [http://www.portfolio.com/resources/executive-profiles/1984 Condé Nast Portfolio Executive Profile - Portfolio.com (August 2007)]
* [http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_1.html Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos - Fastcompany.com (August 2004)]
* [http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers (August 1994)]