Jeff Bezos Biography

Jeff Bezos is an American online retail pioneer and tycoon, with a net worth of over $100 billion, according to the Jan. 2018 Bloomberg billionaire tracker. 

As founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), he changed the way Americans buy books, which quickly expanded to the way they purchase all manner of consumer goods.

A graduate of Princeton University, Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, at the age of 30, when worldwide internet use was still in its infancy, and online shoppers were even rarer. Bezos had become convinced of the internet’s immense mercantile potential during his stints at Bankers Trust and D. E. Shaw & Co. (For more, see: 10 Facts You Didn’t Know About Amazon.)

Amazon began by selling books online, and implemented some of its longstanding features within the first few years, including One-Click Shopping, and its Amazon Associates Program. It went public in 1996, and was listed on the Nasdaq. Since then, the company has grown exponentially through aggressive acquisitions and canny innovations to become the top online retailer in the United States.

Along the way, Amazon has expanded beyond simple retail, essentially creating the market for e-books and e-readers, developing a smartphone and tablet business, and either playing a major role or experimenting in almost every consumer market, from fashion to electronics to groceries to streaming music and movies, to producing its own television series. It has also outstripped nearly all of its competitors with fast order-fulfillment times, and it is even working on a drone-operated package delivery service. (For more, see: How We'll All Be Amazon.com Customers Eventually.)

While not every experiment has been a success, many of them have paid off handsomely. Between its initial public offering (IPO) and April 2015, the value of its stock has grown more than 500-fold. 

Bezos, who owns 18% of the company, has used his wealth to expand into a number of areas. In 2013, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million. Having seen the impact the internet has had on a number of traditional businesses, he is also known to have invested in a number of disruptive online startups, such as Airbnb, MakerBot Industries, Uber and Zocdoc. (For more, see: This Is What Jeff Bezos's Portfolio Looks Like.)