In 1994, a 30-year-old vice president at D.E. Shaw read that the web was growing 2.300% a year, listed 20 products, and chose books. He quit his job, crossed the country in an 88 Chevy Blazer, and built a website in a Bellevue garage, with a desk made from a door. Thirty-two years later, Amazon is the world's largest company by revenue, AWS is the cloud's profit engine — and Jeffrey Preston Bezos (Albuquerque, 12 January 1964) is a CEO again, this time at an AI laboratory.
Princeton, Wall Street, and the 2.300% statistic
Born Jorgensen and adopted by Cuban-born Miguel “Mike” Bezos, Jeff grew up in Houston and Miami. High school valedictorian. In 1986 he graduated from Princeton summa cum laude in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked at Fitel (telecom), Bankers Trust (vice president at 26), and, in 1990, the quantitative fund D.E. Shaw — its youngest SVP.
David Shaw asked him to study the internet. The figure (web usage growing more than 2.000% a year) left no room for “later.” Shaw tried to persuade him to stay: it was a good idea, but better for someone who did not already have a good job. Bezos applied what he called regret minimization — at 80, he would regret not having tried more. MacKenzie Tuttle (later Scott) left with him.
1994: Cadabra, Amazon, and the door desk
The company began as Cadabra. The name sounded like “cadaver.” Amazon came from the river — the longest, reflecting the intention to have the longest catalog. Headquarters in Seattle because Ingram (the book distributor) was nearby and because Microsoft had filled the city with engineers. The site went live in 1995. IPO in 1997. For years the mantra was market share, not profit. Wall Street complained; Bezos repeated “Day 1.”.
The door desk became company folklore: if a desk can be a door, the money went to the customer. The culture that emerged — internal press releases before code, “two-pizza teams,” the 2013 email requesting narratives instead of PowerPoint — is as widely copied as it is criticized.
From bookstore to “everything store”
Prime in 2005: two-day shipping by subscription, then seen as margin suicide. Kindle in 2007: Amazon took control of the device, the store, and the file. Echo and Alexa in 2014. Whole Foods in 2017. Fire Phone was a flop. Every bet followed the same logic: grow the network of customers, data, and logistics until the cost of serving the next order falls.
The ugly side came along. Reports about warehouse pace, taxes, bargaining power with publishers, and American and European antitrust scrutiny. Bezos argues scale and consumer prices. Critics argue monopoly with an orange smile.
AWS, 2006: the engine hidden behind retail
Around 2003, at a retreat at Bezos's house, he and Andy Jassy (then the founder's technical “shadow”) designed an internal services platform. S3 and EC2 launched in 2006. AWS quietly became the profitable part: a fraction of revenue, a disproportionate share of operating income. Almost all of it runs Linux — Amazon Linux, Nitro, Graviton. Without the kernel from Linus Torvalds, the cloud Amazon sells would not exist.
Jassy led AWS from its 57-person team. On 5 July 2021 — the anniversary marking 27 years of Amazon — he became CEO. Bezos moved to executive chairman.
Blue Origin and the flight of 20 July 2021
Blue Origin has existed since 2000, years before Amazon's first profit. New Shepard is the reusable suborbital rocket; New Glenn, the orbital one. On 20 July 2021, 52 years after Apollo 11, Bezos flew with his brother Mark, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. The rivalry with Elon Musk and his SpaceX is public and ongoing: schedules, reuse, lunar contracts.
In 2026 Blue Origin was preparing an outside funding round of around US$ 10 billion, at a reported valuation of US$ 130 billion — after a rocket accident in May. Bezos continues injecting his personal fortune. The stated goal has never changed: millions of people living and working in space, Earth as a preservation district.
Washington Post, Earth Fund, Prometheus
In 2013 he bought the Washington Post from the Graham family for US$ 250 million. At first, financial “runway” and a larger newsroom. From 2023 onward, losses in the tens of millions, buyouts, cutting half the newsroom budget in 2026, and the decision not to endorse a candidate in 2024. The owner who saved the newspaper began managing it with Amazon's same obsession with efficiency — and paid in reputation.
In the 2019 divorce, MacKenzie Scott received a quarter of his Amazon stake (then ~16%). Bezos pledged US$ 10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund by 2030 and US$ 2 billion to the Day One Fund (housing and preschool). In 2026, already one of the world's three richest men (a fortune fluctuating around US$ 220–280 billion, depending on the index), he co-founded Prometheus with Vik Bajaj: AI for the “dream–build loop,” engineering physical things. He told CNBC that being co-CEO again is “Type 2 fun” — only enjoyable after you come down the mountain. Prometheus, Blue Origin, and AI at Amazon take up most of his calendar.
Timeline
- 12/jan/1964 — Born in Albuquerque (New Mexico)
- 1986 — Graduates from Princeton (electrical engineering and computer science)
- 1990 — Joins the quantitative fund D.E. Shaw
- 1994 — Leaves his job and founds the company (Cadabra, later Amazon)
- 1995 — Amazon.com goes live
- 1997 — Amazon IPO
- 2000 — Founds Blue Origin
- 2005 — Amazon Prime launches
- 2006 — AWS is born (S3 and EC2)
- 2007 — Kindle
- 2013 — Buys the Washington Post (US$ 250 million)
- 2019 — Divorce; MacKenzie Scott receives a quarter of his Amazon stake
- 5/jul/2021 — Steps down as CEO; Andy Jassy takes over
- 20/jul/2021 — Flies to space on New Shepard
- 2026 — Co-founds Prometheus (AI for physical engineering)
Wrap-up
Bezos did not invent e-commerce or the cloud. He invented the discipline of treating both as a system: catalog, logistics, API, reinvested margins. Linux underneath AWS is the detail business biographies almost never mention — and the one that matters here. Day 1 has lasted 35 years for the kernel; for Amazon, 32. Neither has reached Day 2 yet.
Cover illustration drawn from a photograph of Jeff Bezos available on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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