By Jeff Bezos: a perfect icon of innovation
When it comes to wealth, Jeff Bezos is a perfect icon. Having been from humble beginnings, he has been able to sail through life and making a fortune. At 56 years, he is the CEO of Amazon and Blue Original a space exploration company among many other businesses and investments. He is currently the wealthiest man alive according to Forbes.
However easy it may seem, it was not all rosy for Bezos. Here we walk through the journey of Jeff Bezos from his humble beginnings to the man he is now.
Early Life
Bezos was born on 12th January 1964 at Albuquerque, New Mexico. He grew up in Houston where he spent most of his childhood but later relocated to Miami where he went to high school. At four years old, his parents got a divorce and his mother got married to a Cuban immigrant who would later adopt Jeff and hence changing his sir name from Jorgensen to Bezos.
While in high school Jeff worked at McDonald as a cook in the morning hours. However, from a young age, Jeff has always shown interest in science and technology with one of his dream being to one day enable space travel and turn earth into a huge park. He is known to have won several awards including the Silver Knight Award of 1982. His passion led him to graduate with a (BSE) in electrical engineering with computer science from Princeton University.
Career
After his graduation, Jeff proceeded to the job market where he worked for many companies including Intel, Fitel, Bell labs, and many others. With passion and discipline at work, he was able to go through to serving at the top positions in most of his workplaces. He would later leave the job market to start up his own business which through hard work is now what is making him millions of dollars. So how did Jeff Bezos start and run his businesses to what we now know? Here’s how.
Amazon
In early 1994 Jeff resigned from his job where he was a senior vice president at D.E. Shaw & Co to start up his online book shop which he called Cadabra. He later changed its name to the now famously known Amazon; this is because it not only represents the iconic Amazon River but also because it starts with the first alphabet.
Even with a $300,000 startup funding from his parents, Jeff was almost sure that the business would later go bankrupt and collapse. He continued expanding his online services to even offering online music and video sales by 1998, towards the end of the same year he had already introduced some consumer goods to the company.
In 2002, Bezos was able to secure a bank loan of $2 billion. This was able to give the company a great boost in terms of revenue and also gave it enough energy to expand. However, in 2002 the company had some huge financial problems which led to the laying off of 14 percent of its employees, although Bezos was able to contain the situation and things were stable by the following year. Over the years, Bezos started selling millions of dollars’ worth of shares which boosted the company even more.
He became richer than Bill Gates at the beginning of 2017 when his net worth was estimated to be a whopping $90 billion. As the same year was coming to an end, he was at $100 billion and by 2018 his worth had increased to more than $111billion
Blue Origin
In 2002, Bezos executed his childhood dream by launching Blue Origin (a space exploration company). The company went underground and was not out of the public eye until mid-2006 when they started to launch their first spaceship. However, it was until 2016 when their first flight successfully landed dummy passengers. The company is still growing and is making a great move to make space travel a success.
Other Businesses
Jeff Bezos has had a series of other businesses.
- The Washington Post. Bezos was able to purchase the newspaper in 2013 making him the new owner. It was until 2016 when the company started making a good profit.
- Bezos Expedition. Jeff makes his investments using this particular venture vehicle. He has bought several shares under this venture which have earned him billions of dollars. A good example is shares worth $250,000 from Google which by 2017 was worth $3.1 billion.
Jeff Bezos is a perfect example of a hard worker who grabbed every opportunity that he came across and made the most out of it. He is proof enough that nothing comes from a silver platter.
