The ranch kid
A teenage mother, an immigrant stepfather and summers fixing windmills.
- 12 January 1964
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico
His mother, Jacklyn, is 17. When he is four she marries Miguel "Mike" Bezos, who had arrived from Cuba alone at 16. Mike adopts him, and Jeff takes his name.
- Summers, age 4 – 16
The Cotulla ranch
He spends summers on his grandfather's Texas ranch, fixing windmills, castrating cattle and repairing a broken-down tractor. His grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, had worked for the US Atomic Energy Commission and the agency that became DARPA.
- 1982
Valedictorian, with a speech about space
At Miami Palmetto High School his valedictory speech describes moving people and industry off Earth into space colonies.
- 1986
Princeton, summa cum laude
He graduates in electrical engineering and computer science.
Wall Street, then the leap
A hedge fund, a statistic and a decision at age 30.
- 1986 – 1994
From fintech to D. E. Shaw
He works at the trade-network start-up Fitel and at Bankers Trust, then joins the quantitative hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where he becomes its youngest senior vice president.
- Spring 1994
A number he couldn't ignore
He reads that web use is growing by about 2,300% a year and draws up a list of products to sell online. Books win: millions of titles, too many for any physical shop.
Picture yourself at 80
His boss urged him to think it over for 48 hours. Bezos imagined himself at 80 looking back. Drag yourself forward in time and choose.
"I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried."Jeff Bezos, 2001 interview
The garage
Door desks, a bell for every order and his parents' savings.
- 5 July 1994
Cadabra, Inc.
He and his wife MacKenzie drive west; he types the business plan on a laptop in the passenger seat. The company is founded in their rented house in Bellevue, Washington, and works out of the garage. A lawyer mishears "Cadabra" as "cadaver", so it becomes Amazon, named after the world's biggest river and chosen partly because it starts with A.
- 1995
His parents bet $245,573
Jackie and Mike Bezos invest most of their savings. He warns them there is about a 70% chance they will lose it all.
- 16 July 1995
Amazon.com opens
The first book sold is Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, about computer models of thought. A bell rings for every order until there are too many to ring for. Within a month it has shipped to all 50 US states and 45 countries.
- 1995 onward
Door desks
Desks are made from cheap wooden doors with legs bolted on. They become an Amazon symbol of frugality, and the "Door Desk Award" is still given for money-saving ideas.
Place an order. Ring the bell.
In the first weeks a bell rang in the office every time someone bought a book, until orders came too fast to bear. Here is a recreation of the early site's style (not the original page). Turn your sound on and buy the first book Amazon ever sold.
Amazon.com Books!Earth's Biggest Bookstore · one million titles, consistently low prices
Douglas Hofstadter
Computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought
IPO, bubble, crash
Person of the Year, then "Amazon.bomb".
- 15 May 1997
IPO at $18 a share
Amazon lists on Nasdaq. In his first shareholder letter he writes: "It's all about the long term." He has attached that letter to every annual letter since.
What a bet at the IPO became
Splits: 2-for-1 (1998), 3-for-1 (1999), 2-for-1 (1999) and 20-for-1 (2022). Valued at about $255 a share, Amazon's price in September 2026. Dividends: Amazon has never paid one.
- December 1999
Time Person of the Year
At 35 he is one of the youngest ever chosen. Earlier that year Barron's had run the cover "Amazon.bomb".
- 2000 – 2001
The crash
The dot-com bubble bursts. Amazon's shares fall from about $107 to under $6. It lays off staff and closes a warehouse, but keeps building. In the last quarter of 2001 it makes its first profit: about $5 million.
Prices before splits, rounded. Anyone who sold at the bottom missed the next 25 years.
The flywheel
Prime, AWS, Kindle, and some flops.
The Amazon flywheel
Lower prices bring more customers. More customers bring more sellers and selection, which improves the experience and brings more customers. Growth lowers costs, which allows lower prices. Each push makes the wheel spin faster. Click "Push" to add energy.
- 2004
No more PowerPoint
He bans slide decks in senior meetings. Instead, teams write six-page narrative memos, and every meeting starts with everyone reading in silence.
The slide deck
Bullets hide the thinking. Bezos: "PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas."
The six-page narrative
"Full sentences are harder to write. They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences." Illustrative example memo.
How fast should you decide?
From his 2015 letter: some decisions are "one-way doors", hard or impossible to reverse, so decide slowly and carefully. Most are "two-way doors": if you're wrong, walk back through. Big companies go wrong by treating every decision like a one-way door. Sort these.
- February 2005
Amazon Prime
Unlimited two-day shipping for $79 a year. Analysts call it reckless. It becomes the core of the flywheel.
- 14 March 2006
Amazon Web Services
AWS launches S3 storage, renting out the computing systems Amazon built for itself. EC2 follows in August. It grows into the world's largest cloud business and Amazon's main source of profit.
- 19 November 2007
Kindle
The first Kindle sells out in under six hours at $399.
- 2014
The Fire Phone flops
Amazon takes a $170 million write-down on unsold phones. Bezos tells staff that big failures are the price of big bets.
- November 2014
Echo and Alexa
Built partly from the Fire Phone team, the Echo speaker creates a new product category.
Why he kept teams small
A team should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. The reason is maths: the number of person-to-person links grows much faster than the team. Drag to add people.
The empire
A newspaper, a grocer, a trillion dollars and a handover.
From $148 million to $638 billion a year
US$ billions, fiscal years, from Amazon's annual reports. AWS has been reported separately since 2013.
- August 2013
Buys The Washington Post
With $250 million of his own money, not Amazon's.
- August 2017
Whole Foods for $13.7 billion
Amazon's biggest acquisition, and its jump into physical grocery stores.
- 2017 – 2018
The richest person in the world
He passes Bill Gates; in March 2018 Forbes puts him at $112 billion. In September 2018 Amazon becomes the second US company worth $1 trillion.
- 2019
Divorce
He and MacKenzie Scott divorce after 25 years. She receives about 4% of Amazon, then worth around $38 billion, and becomes one of the world's biggest philanthropists.
- February 2020
Bezos Earth Fund
He commits $10 billion to fighting climate change.
- 5 July 2021
Steps down as CEO
On Amazon's 27th birthday he hands the CEO job to Andy Jassy, who built AWS, and becomes executive chairman.
Gradatim ferociter
"Step by step, ferociously": Blue Origin's motto.
- 8 September 2000
Blue Origin is founded
Quietly, in Kent, Washington. He funds it by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year. The goal, he says, is millions of people living and working in space.
- 23 November 2015
A rocket lands itself
New Shepard flies above 100 km and its booster lands vertically back in West Texas, the first rocket to reach space and land upright.
- 20 July 2021
Bezos goes to space
On the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11 he flies New Shepard to about 107 km with his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. The flight lasts 10 minutes and 10 seconds. The hero animation at the top of this page follows that flight profile.
107 km · 10 min 10 s - May 2023
A Moon lander for NASA
Blue Origin wins a $3.4 billion NASA contract to build the Blue Moon lander for the Artemis programme.
- 16 January 2025
New Glenn reaches orbit
Blue Origin's 98-metre heavy rocket reaches orbit on its first try. On its second flight, in November 2025, it launches NASA's ESCAPADE Mars probes and lands its booster on a ship at sea.
New Glenn's first launch, 16 January 2025, captured by NOAA's GOES weather satellite. Watch the plume streak out over the Atlantic. Imagery: CSU/CIRA and NOAA, public domain.
- 28 May 2026
An explosion on the pad
A New Glenn rocket explodes during an engine test at Cape Canaveral, destroying the launch tower's erector. Investigators trace it to one of the BE-4 engines. Blue Origin says it will fly again before the end of 2026.
Setback
Executive chairman
Miami, a wedding in Venice and a rocket to rebuild.
- 2023
Moves to Miami
He leaves Seattle for Florida, closer to his parents and to Blue Origin's rocket operations at Cape Canaveral.
- 27 June 2025
Marries Lauren Sánchez
In Venice, Italy. Two months earlier she flew to space on an all-women New Shepard flight.
- August 2026
Among the three richest people alive
Forbes estimates his fortune at about $287 billion, most of it Amazon stock. Amazon itself is worth about $2.7 trillion.
In his words
From the shareholder letters.
Day 2 is stasis. So it's always Day 1.
"Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1." He wrote that in 2016. Ten years on, at 62, he still runs a rocket company like a start-up and still owns about 8% of the store that began in a garage.