Jeff Bezos

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Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Bezos, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University, worked as a financial analyst for D.E. Shaw before founding Amazon in 1994. He was TIME magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Artificial Artificial Intelligence 4 Estimated wealth 5 Quotes 6 Trivia 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] Early life

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother's ancestors were early settlers in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos's maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent most summers of his youth, working with his grandfather at the enormously varied tasks essential to the operation. At an early age, he displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. Even as a toddler, he asserted himself by dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.

Bezos was born when his mother, Jackie Bezos, was still in her teens, and her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Bezos was five. Bezos's stepfather, Miguel Bezos, was born in Cuba. He escaped to the United States alone at age 15, and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Bezos's mother, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary in Houston from the 4th to 6th grades.

Bezos showed intense and varied scientific interests at an early age. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and maintain his secrecy. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for his science projects. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School [1]. In high school, Bezos fell in love with computers and was valedictorian of his class. He entered Princeton University planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers, and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

[edit] Career

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. Later on Bezos also worked in computer science for DE Shaw.

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, and became one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs. In 2004, he founded a human spaceflight start-up company called Blue Origin.

Bezos also has a personal investment company called Bezos Expeditions. It has invested in companies such as 37signals [2] and MFG.com[3].

[edit] Artificial Artificial Intelligence

. Artificial artificial intelligence (AAI) is a term coined by Jeff Bezos. Certain computational tasks, such as identifying whether a person in a photograph is male or female, are carried out much faster by humans than computers. The idea of artificial artificial intelligence is to outsource those parts of a computer program to humans. For example, those tasks can be submitted to a website where users reap financial rewards for completing them. An example of such a site is the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Another example of AAI is the use of unsuspecting internet surfers to decode (and thus defeat) CAPTCHAs.

[edit] Estimated wealth

According to Forbes list of the World's Wealthiest People [4]:

• 1999 – $10.1 billion, ranked no. 19

• 2000 – $6.0 billion, ranked no. 55

• 2001 – $2.0 billion, ranked no. 234

• 2002 – $1.5 billion, ranked no. 293

• 2003 – $2.5 billion, ranked no. 147

• 2004 – $5.1 billion, ranked no. 82

• 2005 – $4.8 billion, ranked no. 41

• 2006 – $4.3 billion, ranked no. 147 (shared with others)

• 2006 – $3.6 billion, ranked no. 70 (shared with 2 others) [5]:

[edit] Quotes

• "I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online".

• "I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is never trying".

• "I think it's always hard to know why you're drawn to a particular thing. I think part of it is, if you have a facility with that thing, of course it's satisfying to do it and so in a way that's self-reinforcing".

• "We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun".

[edit] Trivia

Jeff Bezos is often misrepresented by the Greek media as possessing Greek ancestry. Apparently, it is a misunderstanding popularized some time during Amazon's first years, which has since been reproduced without further research. As recently as June 2006, the Sunday Newspaper "Proto Thema" cited him as "the son of Greek immigrants to America".

Bezos attended a Montessori school as a child.

Bezos chose the domain name Amazon.com because at the time, Yahoo.com listed their search results in alphabetical order; therefore, Amazon would be at or near the top of the search results.

4. Attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School.

[edit] See also

• Amazon

[edit] External links

• Time Magazine's 1999 "Person of the Year" Profile

• Webpage at Amazon

• Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos - Fastcompany.com (DD/MM/YY)

• Usenet posting on 8/22/1994: Amazon is hiring (Google Groups)