Sunday, January 27, 2008
Financial analyst and computer scientist Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, at the cusp of the dotcom explosion. Born January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother who divorced his father while Jeff was still a baby, young Jeffrey was a tinkerer from an early age. As a toddler, he took his crib apart with a screwdriver, and when he was older and his mother had remarried Cuban engineer Miguel Bezos, he built an alarm for his room to keep his half-siblings out. Summers were often spent on the 25,000 acre Texas ranch of his grandfather, a retired administrator for the Atomic Energy Commission.
When Bezos enrolled at Princeton, the young science aficionado planned to study physics, but the personal computing revolution had begun with the recent release of the IBM PC and PCjr, and the Apple MacIntosh, and he wound up getting his bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering. After Princeton, he worked as a computer expert on Wall Street during the 80s and early 90s.
In the early 90s, Bezos put together a business plan for an online bookstore, believing that books were a perfect example of a product that could take advantage of the fact that an online store did not have the physical restriction on inventory that brick-and-mortar stores had, and was easier to search through than mail order catalogues. Bezos didn't expect the company -- originally called Cadabra (short for Abracadabra) -- to turn a profit for its first few years of operation, but professed that patience would pay off. The renamed Amazon.com was incorporated in 1994 in Washington state, went public in 1997, and reported its first profits in 2002.
Along the way, Bezos was named Time's Man of the Year in 1999 for his role in the popularity of online shopping, and Amazon has expanded beyond books, offering everything from regular grocery deliveries to high-end electronics. Bezos continued to serve as Amazon's CEO; though his salary is under six figures, he owns nearly a quarter of the company's stock, making him number 35 on Forbes' 2007 list of the world's wealthiest people, with a net worth of $8.7 billion.
