Born Jorgensen
The richest man in the world for four straight years did not start life with his famous surname. He was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
His mother Jacklyn was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time, and his father Ted was nineteen, a Danish American unicyclist. Jacklyn finished high school in difficult circumstances and then attended night school, bringing her baby with her.
Ted struggled with alcohol and money, and Jacklyn left him, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was seventeen months old. In April 1968 she married a Cuban immigrant, Miguel "Mike" Bezos. Shortly after the wedding Mike adopted the four-year-old, and the boy's surname was legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.
Summers on a Texas Ranch
Bezos's maternal grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the family ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where his grandson spent many childhood summers. Bezos later bought that ranch and expanded it from 25,000 acres to 160,000.
He showed his engineering streak early, once rigging an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room. The family moved to Houston, then Miami, where he worked the breakfast shift at McDonald's as a short-order line cook.
He was valedictorian of his high school, a National Merit Scholar and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982. His graduation speech was about human space colonisation: he told a local newspaper he hoped humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space, preserving Earth as "a huge national park".
Princeton, Wall Street and a Road Trip
At Princeton, Bezos initially majored in physics before switching to electrical engineering and computer science, graduating in 1986. He later explained why he changed course: a classmate, Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, solved a mathematical problem that had defeated him, and he gave up his ambition of becoming a theoretical physicist.
He spent 1986 to early 1994 working on Wall Street across a range of related fields.
Then he quit. He founded Amazon in mid-1994 during a road trip from New York City to Seattle, which is an unusually literal version of the story every startup wants to tell. The company began as an online bookstore, and that is all it was meant to be at the start.
From Bookshop to Everything
Amazon did not stay a bookshop. It expanded into a huge range of e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
It is now the world's largest online sales company and the largest internet company by revenue. Through Amazon Web Services it is also the largest provider of cloud infrastructure services and of virtual assistants.
On 5 July 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO and president, taking the role of executive chairman and handing the top job to Andy Jassy, who had been running Amazon Web Services. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes he was the world's wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, and in 2026 his net worth stood at approximately 284 billion dollars.
Rockets, and a Newspaper
The space ambition from that high school graduation speech never went away. In 2000 Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight company, and in 2021 he flew into space himself aboard Blue Origin's NS-16 flight.
In 2013 he bought The Washington Post, one of the major American newspapers, and he manages many other investments through his venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions.
His wealth records are their own category. He was the first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index, and was named the "richest man in modern history" when his net worth passed 150 billion dollars in July 2018. The boy whose surname was changed at four ended up with his name on a rocket company, a newspaper and the world's largest shop.
