“Being the CEO of Amazon is a huge and consuming responsibility. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to pay attention to anything else. As CEO, I will continue to be involved in important Amazon initiatives, but also I will have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy and it’s not about retiring. I am very passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.”
With these words Jeff Bezos, after 30 at the helm of the absolute reference of Western eCommerce. A shocking decision, culminating three decades of unstoppable growth. But… how did Bezos come to build this empire? This is his story.
“Work hard. She has fun. make history”
With a fortune valued (in mid-2021) at 150,000 million euros, the largest in the world ahead of , Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazonis a visionary entrepreneur who has managed to make his youthful dreams come true, without tricks or tricks.
Your business history is a story full of aphorisms that now try to explain the keys to success of the world’s leading eCommerce company (or how to become Jeff Bezos), but behind that leadership lesson there is a biography as revealing as the achievements he has been adding.
Who is Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is the creator of amazonthe founder of Blue Origin and, since 2013, the owner of the Washington Post; an ambitious, passionate, persuasive, patient, severe man, with his feet on the ground and his head in the future.
But he is also the man who gave world fame to the surname of an emigrant family from Villafrechosa town of 500 inhabitants, from Valladolid, which the hundredbillionaire he visited privately in 2011 to learn about his adoptive father’s origins.
“It’s harder to be nice than it is to be smart”
The owner of Amazon, ‘the store of dreams’ (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazonby Brad Stone), was born in January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her mother, Jacklyn Gise, was 17 years old and had a relationship with Ted Jorgensen that lasted only a few months after the birth of her son.
Jeff never knew his biological father. Miguel ‘Mike’ Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, who would end up earning a living as an engineer for ExxonMobil, took his place by marrying Jackie a short time later. He became her natural father. He adopted him and gave him his last name, so Jeffrey Preston grew up as Bezos alongside his siblings Mark and Christina. First in Albuquerque, later in Houston and Miami.
He spent the summers on the ranch that his maternal grandparents had in Cotulla, Texas. There he learned to take care of cattle and combat boredom with calculation games and probabilities. How much oxygen does a person consume? How much does each member of the family spend on food? How many years of life can you lose because of tobacco? Nine years old, she told her grandmother Mattie that she was going to waste it if she kept smoking like that, not knowing that she already had cancer. Hearing this, the woman burst into tears: “It’s harder to be kind than to be smart” explained his grandfather.
“There is much left to invent”
Lawrence Gise was a great influence during his apprenticeship. Along with him he discovered the interest in science and space rocketsalso demonstrated his mechanical ability and even for business, outside the family ranch. The proof is that before finishing school she created a camp to encourage children’s reading. She cost $600 and got six kids to sign up.
Jeff Bezos was a bright, witty, non-conformist kid, passionate about electrical appliances. He disassembled his crib with a screwdriver to make it clear that he wanted to sleep in a real bed, he devised an electronic alarm system to prevent his little brothers from approaching his room and he dreamed of a system of hotels, amusement parks and space colonies orbiting around the Earth.
Keep trying to get it. Every year it sells Amazon shares worth 1,000 million dollars to finance Blue Origin, a project launched in 2000 to develop rockets that allow commercial space travel at an affordable cost. A dream that came true July 20, 2021when Bezos, accompanied by his brother and two other space tourists, successfully completed the first pilotless suborbital flight with an entirely civilian crew. And not only that, it also plans to reach the Moon, create a permanent base and run an Amazon-like messaging service.
“I want to help people here and now”
But aside from his aerospace ambition, his math prowess and a natural talent for marrying technology and business, Bezos is a star trek fan who likes to invest in houses (he owns nearly a dozen in the United States and is the 25th land owner in the country, according to Land Report) and “extraordinary wonders” like a 500-foot-tall monumental clock that symbolizes “thought through long term” and that hopes to announce the arrival of the year 10,000 in the depths of a mountain in West Texas.
Your assets allow it: accommodate business and philanthropy, earn and give away money, make your futuristic projects a reality and, incidentally, make life easier for people. Although in this attempt many believe that it has to be more convincing: his wealth grows more and better than his altruistic purposes.
Bezos is the only one of the five richest Americans who has not committed to donating the majority of his fortune to the initiative, promoted by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: He has never been among the 50 largest donors in the country nor has he had a personal foundation that allows him to channel his money towards social works.
The is the only institution that represents the philanthropic commitment of the family. It contributes to education and research projects and is chaired by Jackie and Mike Bezoswho by now know more about charitable giving than Jeff and his wife Mackenzie.
The owner of Amazon seeks his own strategy to help in the short term and obtain immediate results. He asked for ideas through Twitter to fix the world with his money, but it remains to be seen what response the hundreds of suggestions that arrived in his mailbox related to the environment, gender policies, health, education and sexual freedom receive. At the moment, he seems more focused on the Bezos universe and on expanding his own projects.
Request for ideas…
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos)
Goodbye to the position of CEO of Amazon
On February 2, 2021, through a very heartfelt Jeff Bezos announced on his company’s official news blog that he would be stepping down as CEO of Amazon.as well as the reasons why he has made this abrupt decision:
“Amazon Fellows”, began Bezos in . “I am pleased to announce that this third quarter I will transition to CEO, while Andy Jassy will become CEO of Amazon. In the role of CEO, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and new initiatives. Andy is well known within the company and has been with Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader and has my full confidence.”.
“Being the CEO of Amazon is a huge and consuming responsibility. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to pay attention to anything else. As CEO, I will continue to be involved in important Amazon initiatives, but also I will have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy and it’s not about retiring. I am very passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.”
This transition, which will put Andy Jessy at the head of the company from July 5, 2021, it will mean that you will be a little more removed from the daily business, and that you will focus your attention on , your aerospace firm which recently began test flights in late 2020, as well as its other projects.
your final farewell
Finally, on April 16, Jeff Bezos sent a new letter to his shareholders in which he reviewed his career and ended his time in the company:
«Last year we hired 500,000 employees and we now directly employ 1.3 million people worldwide. We have over 200 million Prime members worldwide. More than 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses sell in our store, accounting for nearly 60% of our retail sales. Customers have connected more than 100 million smart home devices to Alexa. serves millions of customers and ended 2020 with an annualized run rate of $50 billion. Back in 1997, we hadn’t invented Prime, Marketplace, Alexa, or AWS. They weren’t even ideas then, and none were predetermined. We took a lot of risk with each one and put sweat and ingenuity into each one.
Along the way, we’ve created $1.6 trillion of shareholder wealth… more than 7/8 of the shares, representing $1.4 trillion of wealth creation, are owned by third parties.”
In his letter, he indicated that in his role as chief executive, he plans to engage more deeply with the operations department, in order to put his inventive ingenuity at their disposal, to create new solutions that improve the working conditions of his employees.
“In my next role as CEO, I will focus on new initiatives. i am an inventor. It’s what I like the most and what I do best. It is where I create more value. I am excited to work alongside the great team of passionate people we have in Operations and help invent in this area of Best Employer on Earth and the Safest Workplace on Earth. On the details, we at Amazon are always flexible, but on matters of vision we are stubborn and unforgiving. We have never failed when we set out to do something, and we are not going to fail in this either.”
“The customer comes first. He invents. And be patient”
Three ideas that he maintains and that culminated in the amazon successyour personal plan for don’t miss the .
As a good fan of computers and technology, he had studied Computer Science and Electronic Engineering on the Princeton University, NJ. He graduated in 1986 and soon began working, first as a programmer and later as a financial analyst at an investment company which accelerated his interest in the market, but upon discovering that Internet grew at 2,300% per year in number of usersHe decided to turn his life around.
He left Wall Street behind without fear of regret and crossed the country with his wife Mackenzie to plan their own online business. In 1994, he met with 60 family members, friends, and potential investors to persuade them to invest $50,000. in his revolutionary idea of creating a point of sale for books on the Internet…
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