Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Hi friends, I hope you're fine? I heard this morning on the radio that Jeffrey Bezos had surpassed Bill Gates in terms of his fortune. But who is he?
Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a US entrepreneur and investor in the fields of technology and commerce.
He is the current founder and CEO of Amazon.com. The company started selling books online and expanded its offering with many products and services. Bezos is also the founder of aerospace company Blue Origin, which made its first test flights in 2015, and the owner of the Washington Post since 2013.
After briefly passing Bill Gates as the most wealthy man on the planet in the summer of 2017, Bezos becomes the richest man in the world in November 2017, with a fortune estimated at more than 100 billion dollars. US dollars, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon is an American ecommerce company based in Seattle. Its original specialty is the sale of books, but it has diversified into other products, including the sale of all types of cultural products and even food.
Created by Jeff Bezos in July 1994, it was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in May 1997. The French subsidiary opened in 2000. In 2016, Amazon became the largest non-food retailer in France in terms of turnover.
In 2017, the company employs 541,900 people worldwide.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin, in reference to Planet Earth, is a company created in 2000 by Jeff Bezos in order to develop new technologies to lower the cost of access to space. The headquarters are in Kent in the suburbs of Seattle. Blue Origin is also developing the New Shepard spacecraft spacecraft that made its first flight in 2015.
In early 2010, the company participated in NASA's Commercial Crew Development program to develop the crew space transportation system. of the International Space Station.
After developing the BE-3 rocket engine for New Shepard's needs, Blue Origin was selected by United Launch Alliance in 2015 to provide the main propulsion for the future Vulcan heavy launcher to replace the Atlas V and Delta 4.
History
He was born under the name of Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. Her father abandons her at birth and remarries a year later. Her teenage mother met Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant living in the United States since the age of fifteen and working at the University of Albuquerque.
She marries Miguel, who adopts Jeff who then bears his name and raises him as his own son.
A graduate of Princeton University in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science, he worked in several Wall Street financial firms, including D.E. Shaw & Co.
In 1994, Jeff Bezos, then 30 years old, is more and more tempted by an idea that obsesses him for a while: "I learned that the use of the web increased by 2,300% per year. I had never seen or heard of anything with such rapid growth, and the idea of creating an online bookstore with millions of titles, something purely inconceivable in the physical world - really enthused me. ".
He then decides to found Amazon.com in 1994, in Seattle, considering that he might regret later not having participated in the internet adventure. The company opened its first site in July 1995. It is currently the largest global online sales company, with a turnover of $ 74.4 billion in 2013. In 2000, it founded a young company specializing in Scholarships and Blue Origin, specializing in space travel.
It also has IMDb sites, Alexa Internet, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon SimpleDB, Kindle, Sellaband, Amazon Kindle, Reflexive Entertainment, Audible.com, 43things.com, Street Friend, LibraryThing, Statistically Improbable Phrases, A9.com. In 2012, he bought the carrier robot company Kiva Systems and in 2013 bought the Washington Post for $ 250 million.
On December 8, 2015, Bezos responds to the criticism of the 2016 Republican presidential candidate in the US presidential election, Donald Trump, who accused him the day before of having acquired the Washington Post for the sole purpose of minimizing the tax burden
weighs on Amazon and its owner in the United States. He publishes a short message on Twitter, where he ironically congratulates himself for having finally been targeted by Trump and offers just as ironically to reserve a seat for the billionaire on a rocket dedicated to space tourism.
The surprise victory of Donald Trump in the same election on November 8, 2016, against the Democratic Hillary Clinton, however, forced the founder of Amazon.com to congratulate the businessman and Republican politician, and wish him "a great success in his service for the country.
During "Black Friday" in 2017, his company reached $ 586 billion in market capitalization, which earned him personally $ 2.4 billion in one day. His fortune reached the $ 100 billion mark, making him the richest man in front of Bill Gates.
Distinctions
ā¢ He was voted Time Magazine Personality of the Year in 1999. At age 35, he is the fourth youngest person to earn this honor, after Charles Lindbergh in 1927, Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, and Martin Luther King in 1963.
ā¢ In 2014, Jeff Bezos is ranked # 1 among the top performing CEOs in the world by Harvard Business Review.
ā¢ In May 2014, Jeff Bezos was voted the "worst boss in the world" in a poll conducted by the International Trade Union Confederation, representing 180 million workers from 161 countries, at its third World Congress.
Private life
He is married, father of 4 children, libertarian and donor of the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation.
Libertarianism
It is a political philosophy for which a just society is a society whose institutions respect and protect the freedom of each individual to exercise his full right of property over himself and the property rights he has legitimately acquired over external objects.
It therefore advocates, within a system of ownership and universal market, the individual freedom as a natural right. Freedom is conceived by libertarianism as a fundamental value of social relations, economic exchanges and the political system.
Libertarians are based on the principle of non-aggression, which states that no one can take physical force against an individual, his person, his freedom or his property.
He is engaged in the transhumanist movement (international cultural and intellectual movement advocating the use of science and technology to improve the human condition, in particular by increasing the physical and mental characteristics of human beings) and obsessed by the long term, he has invested $ 42 million in an electronic clock in Texas, which will be able to give the exact time for the next ten thousand years.