Business
Jeff Bezos
Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin
Born 1964
Photo: Seattle City Council from Seattle · CC BY 2.0
«We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.»
Jeff Bezos left a Wall Street job in 1994 to sell books over the internet from a garage in Seattle, and built Amazon into one of the largest companies on earth. He also founded the rocket company Blue Origin and owns The Washington Post.
Key achievements
- Founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookshop
- Founded the rocket company Blue Origin in 2000
Universities
Princeton, New Jersey
Took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986 after starting in physics.
Facts
- He switched from physics to computer science at Princeton after struggling with a partial differential equations problem that a classmate solved in his head.
- He wrote Amazon's first business plan in the car while his wife drove them from New York to Seattle.
- As a teenager he gave a high school valedictory speech about colonising space, decades before he founded a rocket company.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.