Bezos << BAY zohs >>, Jeffrey Preston (1964-…), is an American computer scientist and businessman. He founded Amazon.com, Inc., a major internet retail company. The company’s website became one of the world’s most popular electronic commerce, or e-commerce, sites. Bezos became one of the wealthiest people in the world.
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Jan. 12, 1964. As a child, he demonstrated an interest in science and technology. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked for the technology company FITEL from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 to 1990, he worked at Bankers Trust Company, first as a computer systems developer, then as vice president. He served as vice president of the financial trading firm D. E. Shaw & Co. from 1990 to 1994.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. The company’s website launched in 1995 as an online bookseller and expanded to sell many types of products and services. Bezos has worked to expand Amazon’s business into such areas as e-book readers and cloud computing—that is, the storage of data and use of software over the internet, rather than on a user’s computer. He served as chief executive officer of the company from 1994 to 2021, when he became its executive chair.
Bezos has also invested outside of Amazon. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post, a daily American newspaper. Bezos also founded the private spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000. The company tested its first rocket in 2015. Later that year, a Blue Origin rocket reached the edge of space and then returned safely to Earth, landing vertically. It was the first rocket to do so. In 2021, Bezos traveled to space aboard New Shepard, a Blue Origin spacecraft. New Shepard reached an altitude of more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, a common definition of the boundary of space.
