Jeff Bezos

He was born in New Mexico, USA. His birth mother was very young when she had him, and later remarried a Cuban immigrant, whose surname, Bezos, he took. He spent several boyhood summers on his grandfather's ranch in Texas, where by his own account he learned independence and hands-on problem-solving. He later went to Princeton, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science and earning top marks.

After graduating he did not rush into founding a company, but first sharpened himself at fintech firms and hedge funds in New York, rising to vice president at a quantitative fund while still young. He could have gone on living the comfortable Wall Street life, but he keenly sensed the explosive growth of the internet, and made a decision others found hard to understand: he gave up the high pay, drove across the United States, and started over in Seattle.

The original company began in a garage. He chose books as his entry point and made the website "the largest bookstore on Earth." The company went public in 1997, then weathered the bursting of the internet bubble — through those years of plunging stock prices and prolonged losses, outsiders questioned this cash-burning, profitless company, but he kept his eyes on the far horizon, staying customer-obsessed and running the business for the long term.

What truly transformed Amazon was its relentless boundary-crossing. It expanded from books to nearly everything, launched the Prime membership program and the Kindle e-reader, and opened its internal technical capabilities to the outside, giving rise to the cloud service AWS — which pioneered an entirely new business model and later became one of the company's most important profit pillars. Around the same time, he also quietly founded the space company Blue Origin, betting on reusable rockets to lower the cost of reaching space.

At the peak of the empire, he personally acquired The Washington Post, Amazon's market value crossed one trillion dollars, and he himself rose to become the world's richest person, holding a top spot for years. The heights of his career also came with upheaval in his private life — he divorced his wife of about twenty-five years, who received a large share of the stock and then devoted herself to large-scale charitable giving.

In 2021 he stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman, turning more of his energy toward space and philanthropy, and personally completed a suborbital flight aboard his own spacecraft, fulfilling a boyhood dream. He is both a business titan who reshaped retail and cloud computing and an explorer who points his wealth and ambition beyond Earth — still one of the key coordinates by which we measure this technological age.