Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and built it into the largest company in the world by revenue. He is unusual among founders for a specific reason: he wrote his method down in advance, published it, and can be measured against it.
The Framework
Bezos has described the decision to leave a secure, well-paid Wall Street job in 1994 using a device he called the regret minimisation framework.
The method is to project yourself to eighty and ask which choice you will regret. He reasoned that at eighty he would not regret trying to build something on the early internet and failing. He would regret not having tried.
That sounds like the kind of thing successful people say afterwards. What makes it worth taking seriously is that he described it as a tool for a decision he had not yet made, and then applied the same posture repeatedly and expensively for thirty years — to a decade without profit, to a rocket company with no near-term market, and to a newspaper.
The Name He Was Given
He was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
His mother, Jacklyn Gise, was seventeen. The marriage to his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, lasted a little over a year. In April 1968, when Jeff was four, Jacklyn’s second husband — a Cuban immigrant named Miguel “Mike” Bezos — adopted him, and his surname was legally changed.
Bezos has been consistent and unsentimental about this: Mike Bezos is his father. He reportedly did not know Jorgensen was not his biological father until he was ten, and did not treat the discovery as significant. Ted Jorgensen, who died in 2015, spent years unaware that the founder of Amazon was his son.
There is a fact worth stating plainly here, because it is usually skipped. The richest man of his generation was raised by a teenage mother and an immigrant stepfather who arrived in the United States alone as a boy.
Summers on the Ranch
His maternal grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission, and later ran a cattle ranch near Cotulla, Texas.
Bezos spent childhood summers there, and has said the experience taught him self-reliance in a specific, unromantic way: on a ranch far from anywhere, you fix the thing yourself because there is nobody else to call. His grandfather repaired his own equipment, including, in the family telling, performing veterinary work on the cattle.
Bezos later bought that ranch and expanded it from 25,000 acres to 160,000. Blue Origin’s launch site is in West Texas.
Princeton, and the Job He Left
After Miami Palmetto High School he went to Princeton, graduating in 1986 with a BSE in engineering, summa cum laude. He had intended to study theoretical physics and moved to computer science after concluding he would not be among the best in the room.
That is a more useful detail than it looks. A man later known for ambition made an early, accurate assessment of where he was not exceptional, and changed direction rather than persisting.
He worked at the fintech startup Fitel, then at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990, then at the quantitative hedge fund D. E. Shaw from 1990 to 1994, where he became a senior vice president by the age of thirty.
It was at D. E. Shaw that he saw the statistic that started everything: web usage growing at something like 2,300 per cent a year.
The Drive
In mid-1994 Bezos and his wife MacKenzie drove from New York to Seattle. He wrote the business plan on the way. Amazon was incorporated on 5 July 1994 in Bellevue, Washington.
He had married MacKenzie Tuttle in 1993, a year before the drive. She worked as one of Amazon’s first employees, doing the accounts.
The Letter He Kept Reprinting
In 1997, the year Amazon listed, Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders arguing that the company would optimise for long-term cash flow rather than short-term reported profit, and would accept years of losses to build market position.
He then attached that same 1997 letter to every annual letter he wrote for the next two decades.
The effect of that was structural rather than sentimental. Reprinting it every year meant no shareholder could later claim to be surprised, and it made a decade of unprofitability defensible in public rather than something to be explained away each quarter. It also gave him cover to keep spending during the years the market had written the company off.
Very few founders have the temperament to publish their strategy and then be bound by it. Fewer still keep publishing it when it is going badly.
Blue Origin
Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, six years into Amazon and long before spaceflight was a plausible business.
For most of two decades it moved slowly, funded largely by selling Amazon stock, while a competitor founded two years later flew far more often. That comparison has followed the company throughout, and it is a fair one.
On 20 July 2021, nine days after stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive, Bezos flew on Blue Origin’s NS-16 mission — a flight of a little over ten minutes, reaching roughly 66.5 miles in altitude.
He thanked Amazon employees and customers on his return for paying for it. The remark was widely reported as tone-deaf, and it was also, in the narrowest sense, accurate.
The Newspaper
On 5 August 2013 Bezos agreed to buy The Washington Post for $250 million of his own money; the sale closed on 1 October.
For a decade the arrangement was held up as a model. He funded the newsroom, invested in its technology, stayed out of the coverage, and the paper grew.
Then in 2024 he blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Editorial staff resigned. Readers cancelled subscriptions in large numbers.
This belongs in the record without softening. The case for an individual owning a major newspaper had rested on the promise that ownership and editorial judgement would be kept apart. Whatever the merits of the decision itself, it was the owner overruling the editorial page, and it cost the paper both staff and readers who had believed the promise.
What He Does Now
Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in July 2021, becoming executive chairman; Andy Jassy replaced him.
He and MacKenzie divorced in 2019. She received a quarter of his Amazon shares, worth roughly $36 billion at the time — the largest divorce settlement on record. She has since given away a very large part of it at a speed the philanthropic sector was not built for, which has become a story in its own right. They have four children: three sons, and a daughter adopted from China.
He married Lauren Sánchez in 2025.
His philanthropy runs mainly through the Bezos Earth Fund, on climate, and the Day 1 Fund, on homelessness and early education. In November 2025 he co-founded Project Prometheus with the former Google executive Vik Bajaj, applying artificial intelligence to engineering and manufacturing.
As of May 2026 the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put his fortune at about $279 billion, fourth in the world.
The company he built is covered separately: Amazon – The Bookshop That Sold Its Own Plumbing.
Common Questions
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How This Was Written
Figures are as at the date of publication.
Photography is public domain or CC0 and is credited in the site’s image credits. Corrections: commissions@99founder.com.
