Jeff Bezos: Founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon
Business Owner · Retail & E-commerce
Jeff Bezos turned a 1994 online bookstore into Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud company, and went on to found Blue Origin and buy The Washington Post.
About Jeff Bezos: Founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon
Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. His mother was a 17-year-old high-school student when he was born; when he was four she married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos, who adopted him, and the family later settled in Houston, where Mike worked as an engineer for Exxon. Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in engineering and spent the next eight years working on Wall Street. In mid-1994 he founded Amazon during a road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and grew into a marketplace for almost everything, adding video and audio streaming, cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, and artificial intelligence. It is now the largest online sales company and the largest Internet company by revenue. Outside Amazon, Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000 and flew to space aboard Blue Origin's NS-16 mission in 2021. He bought The Washington Post in 2013 and manages other investments through his venture firm Bezos Expeditions. On July 5, 2021 he stepped down as CEO and president of Amazon, handing the role to Andy Jassy while remaining executive chairman. According to Bloomberg and Forbes, Bezos was the world's wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, was the first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index, and in 2026 had a net worth of approximately US$284 billion. Sources: English Wikipedia (Jeff Bezos, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Founder and Executive Chairman, Amazon; founder, Blue Origin
Company Details
Amazon / Blue Origin
E-commerce, Cloud Computing, Aerospace