What’s Next for Jeff Bezos and Amazon?
L
ate this July, Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man when Amazon’s stock shot past $1,082 per share. The surge of the world’s largest ecommerce company’s shares placed its founder Bezos’ notional wealth at $92 billion, surpassing Microsoft mogul Bill Gates’ fortune. But the joy, if that, was short-lived as Amazon’s shares tanked 3% on poor results, restoring the relative status of the fortunes of Seattle’s two richest men. Truth be told, Bezos, 53, has shown no particular hunger to become the world’s richest. Instead, he has shown vision that has led some to believe he is the next Steve Jobs, and a worthy rival to Elon Musk. He has serious plays out in the world of business to be considered – pioneering both ecommerce and cloud computing to enormous scale, reviving print media’s fortunes via acquisition of the iconic Washington Post, reimagining brick-and-mortar via new stores as much as the $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods and exploring otherworldly planets through his Blue Origin.
24 europeanbusinessmagazine.com
Just how did Bezos come to be? By most reckoning, Amazon’s founder had a “normal” childhood. He was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen, who today runs a bicycle store in Arizona. The couple split a year later and Jacklyn married Miguel “Mike” Bezos,
a Cuban immigrant, who adopted the four-year-old Jeff. Bezos was 10 when he learned of his real father, but appears to have given the fact scant attention. Like many boys, Bezos loved to tinker with stuff. In an early sign of his ingenuity, he once took apart his cot with a screwdriver. Over many summers, the young Bezos would repair windmills, lay pipes, repair pumps and castrate bulls in his grandparents’ ranch in Texas, and even work at McDonald’s. He was also deeply into science and is believed to have designed a hovercraft and a robot, besides building an electric alarm to keep his siblings away from his room. An early sign of entrepreneurship