Jeff Bezos, the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon, is the richest person in the world, with a personal net worth of $137.1 billion (as of Jan. 10, 2019), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. We look at a few interesting facts about Bezos that you may not have known.
Bezos’ maternal ancestors owned land in Texas, U.S., making him among the largest landholders in the area. As a kid, he spent many summers with his grandfather at a 25,000-acre ranch near the city of Cotulla.
Bezos showed mechanical aptitude even as a child, dismantling his crib as a toddler and rigging an electric alarm to keep siblings out of his room.
When he was five, Bezos saw the Apollo 11 moon landing and decided he wanted to be an astronaut. However, his parents felt he had become too bookish by the time he was eight and enrolled him in team sports like football.
After his divorce, Bezos' birth father alienated himself from the family. Jorgensen, who owns a bike shop in Glendale, Arizona, U.S., didn’t know what became of his previous family. He only found out about his son in 2013.
Born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, to Ted Jorgensen and Jacklyn Gise (L), Bezos claims he does not have any memories of his biological father. His parents were in high school when he was born and their marriage lasted 17 months; the divorce was finalized when he was only three years old.
Three years later, his mother married Miguel "Mike" Bezos (R), a Cuban immigrant to the U.S. In a 1999 interview, Bezos said, "The reality, as far as I'm concerned, is that my dad (Miguel) is my natural father. The only time I ever think about it, genuinely, is when a doctor asks me to fill out a form.”
7.As a teen, he spent a summer as a fry cook at a McDonald’s in Miami, Florida, U.S. There, he studied the company’s automation of the kitchen and set up a system that would sound the buzzer to let him know when to scramble the eggs, flip burgers or pull fries out of the fryer.
8.His first entrepreneurial venture was with his high school girlfriend Ursula "Uschi" Werner, in the summer he graduated.
The duo set up a summer education camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders called DREAM, which stood for Directed REAsoning Methods. The camp's reading list included “The Once and Future King,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Watership Down,” “Gulliver's Travels" and “David Copperfield.” The science curriculum included talks about interstellar travel, space colonies and fossil fuels.
9.In his senior year at Princeton, he turned down job offers from Intel, Bell Labs and Andersen Consulting. Instead, he joined a start-up called FITEL that was looking for computer science graduates. He was employee number 11 there and was soon promoted to head of development and director of customer service, which required him to travel weekly between New York City, New York, U.S. and London, England.
10.He used to ask friends to set him up on blind dates. His only ask was: "The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison." He meant he wanted a woman who was resourceful. He started dating a member of his own staff, MacKenzie Tuttle, and the two married in 1993. In January 2019, Bezos announced the couple was divorcing.