Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is an American businessman and investor whose three-decade career produced his 1994 founding of Amazon.com — making him one of the foundational figures of late-20th and early-21st-century international e-commerce industry. He was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, into a working-class American Cuban-Danish-American family. His biological father Theodore John "Ted" Jorgensen was a Cuban-American circus-performer who abandoned the family in 1965, and his mother Jacklyn Gise was a homemaker. His mother subsequently married Cuban-immigrant petroleum engineer Mike Bezos in 1968 (whose surname Jeff legally took at age four).

His education at Princeton University (B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1986) launched his early-career path. His 1986–1988 work at the Fitel international fiber-optic financial-network startup, his subsequent 1988–1990 Bankers Trust Company vice-presidency at age 26 (the youngest Bankers Trust Company vice-president at the time), and his 1990–1994 D. E. Shaw & Co. quantitative-hedge-fund senior-vice-presidency produced his early-career American-finance public profile.

His July 5, 1994 founding of Amazon.com — at the Bezos family Bellevue, Washington garage — launched his late-1990s and 2000s American e-commerce industry public profile. The 1995 first Amazon.com online-bookstore launch (across the cadabra.com and amazon.com domain registrations) and the subsequent May 15, 1997 Amazon.com initial public offering at $18 per share produced his early-career American e-commerce public profile.

His subsequent 1995–2021 Amazon.com chief-executive tenure produced multiple defining 21st-century American e-commerce-and-cloud-computing industry expansions — particularly the 2002 launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the 2007 launch of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, the 2014 launch of the Amazon Echo voice-assistant, and the 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. His 2000 founding of the Blue Origin space-exploration-and-rocket company has produced his early-21st-century American private-spaceflight public profile. He retired from his Amazon.com CEO position on July 5, 2021 (the 27th anniversary of his Amazon.com founding) and has continued to serve as Amazon.com's executive chairman. He married American novelist MacKenzie Scott in 1993 (divorced 2019), and the couple has four children. He has been with American TV personality Lauren Sánchez since 2019.

His name Jeff is the English short form of Jeffrey (from the Old Germanic root meaning "peaceful pledge"). Jeff was a popular American boys' name through the mid-to-late 20th century.