How Jeff built the fortune
Bezos owes nearly all of his wealth to Amazon, the company he started in a rented house near Seattle in 1994. He held a large share of the business when it went public in 1997, and although he has sold stock steadily ever since, much of it to fund Blue Origin and his charitable commitments, he remains one of its largest shareholders. His 2019 divorce settlement transferred about a quarter of his Amazon holding to MacKenzie Scott, yet the company's later growth more than made up for that reduction.
Amazon's early strategy was to reinvest almost every dollar of cash flow into growth, which kept reported profits low for years and puzzled many investors. The bet paid off as the company built a vast logistics network, opened its marketplace to independent sellers and signed up tens of millions of members to its Prime subscription. The biggest single source of profit, however, became Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm launched in 2006, which rents computing power and storage to companies and governments.
Advertising has more recently grown into another large business for Amazon, adding to the value of the shares Bezos still holds. Sponsored product listings inside the Amazon store, together with ads on Prime Video and Twitch, give the company a high-margin revenue stream built on top of its retail traffic, and analysts often treat it as the third pillar of the business next to retail and cloud.
Companies and holdings
Beyond Amazon, Bezos controls several privately held businesses and investments:
- Blue Origin, the rocket company he founded in 2000, which builds the suborbital New Shepard vehicle and the larger New Glenn rocket
- The Washington Post, bought in 2013 through his investment company Nash Holdings
- Bezos Expeditions, his venture investment office, which was an early investor in Google and has backed many other startups
Amazon itself spans online retail, Whole Foods Market, the Kindle and Echo devices, Prime Video, cloud computing and a growing advertising operation. Bezos stepped down as chief executive in July 2021, handing the post to Andy Jassy, and became executive chairman. He has since spent more of his time on Blue Origin, which he has funded largely through annual sales of Amazon stock.
Early life and career
Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in January 1964. His mother, Jacklyn, was a teenager at the time, and he was later adopted by his stepfather, Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer for Exxon. He spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in Texas and grew up mostly in Houston and Miami, where he graduated as valedictorian of his high school.
He studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University, graduating in 1986. He then worked on Wall Street, first at a financial technology startup and later at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where he became one of the youngest senior vice presidents. In 1994, after reading about the rapid growth of web usage, he left the firm, drove across the country with his then wife and wrote much of the business plan for an online bookstore on the way. The company, first called Cadabra and soon renamed Amazon, began taking orders in July 1995.
Philanthropy and public life
For much of his career Bezos was criticized for giving relatively little to charity. That changed from 2018 onward. He launched the Day 1 Fund that year with a commitment of 2 billion dollars to support homeless families and to open free preschools in low-income communities. In 2020 he pledged 10 billion dollars to the Bezos Earth Fund, which makes grants to climate and conservation groups, and he has said he intends to give away most of his wealth during his lifetime.
Bezos moved from Seattle to Miami in 2023, citing family ties to the city. He flew to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin's first crewed flight in July 2021. His ownership of the Washington Post has made him a public figure in debates about media, particularly after changes to the newspaper's opinion pages in 2024 and 2025.