Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA to 17-year old high school student Jackie (née Gise) Jorgensen and her 19-year old husband Theodore Jorgensen. Within 18 months, her marriage had ended and Jackie became a single mom and sole provider for her son. After graduating from a community college where she studied business, she was hired as a bookkeeper for the Bank of New Mexico. It was there that she met Miguel Bezos, who had fled Castro’s Cuba in 1962 and they fell in love. Jackie and Miguel married in 1968 when Jeff was 4. and Miguel adopted Jeff, changing his legal name to Jeffrey Bezos. (Jeff never met his biological father and says that he regards Miguel as his real father.) Within the next two years, siblings Christina and Mark were born to Jackie and Miguel.
Miguel was a role model for Jeff and the person to whom Jeff’s later obsession with work might be attributed. As Jeff Bezos later said of his father, “He is the least lazy person I know.” Through hard work and intelligence, Miguel was able to work his way through college to become an Exxon executive. Miguel’s job with Exxon often required the family to pick up roots and move.
As a precocious toddler of 3, Jeff insisted that he should have a bed instead of a crib, but Jackie denied his request. A short time later, his mother discovered him with screwdriver in hand, dismantling his crib and transforming it into a real bed. Jeff attended a Montessori pre-school where he became so engrossed in each project that he had to be picked up–chair and all–and moved to the next activity.
His elementary teachers in Houston, Texas, recognized immediately that Jeff was a gifted child. At age 8, he was enrolled in the pilot program for gifted students at River Oaks Elementary School. In one of his more ingenious moments, he and some fellow students used a modem to connect a teletype machine to a mainframe computer and used it to play a Star Trek game. On another occasion, he created a makeshift buzzer for his bedroom door to sound an alarm when his younger siblings trespassed on his territory.
Jeff became one of the prized exemplars for the gifted program at River Oaks. In 1977, his intelligence prompted author Julie Ray to feature Jeff as the subject of a chapter in a book she was writing, titled Turning on Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas. In it she described him as a bright student of “general intellectual excellence.”
Jackie Bezos encouraged Jeff’s inventiveness with electronic do-it-yourself kits purchased from Radio Shack. While at River Oaks, he saw his first Infinity Cube–a cube with motorized mirrors that could be adjusted to create multiple reflections that appear to extend to infinity. The visual magic of the Infinity Cube ignited Jeff’s imagination and he asked his mother to purchase the $20 item for him. When Jackie explained that this toy was too expensive, Jeff proceeded to purchase all the parts at a fraction of the price and assembled his own Infinity Cube. As Jeff commented at the time, “You have to be able to think…for yourself.”
After Jeff’s elementary school years, the Bezos family moved to Pensacola, Florida and then on to Miami. Miami was the Latin city where twenty years before, Jeff’s Cuban immigrant father had been lonely and broke. However, Miguel was now an executive at Exxon in the Palmetto section of Miami where they bought their four-bedroom house in an upper middle class area.
At Palmetto High School, Jeff won the school’s Best Science Student award in each of his sophomore, junior and senior years and the Best Math Student award in his junior and senior years. He served notice on his fellow students that he was planning on becoming the valedictorian of the class of 1982, and this promise became a reality when he stood first out of 680 students. In his valedictorian speech, he spoke of colonizing space and he told the Miami Herald of his intention to build hotels and amusement parks there.
When it came time to prepare for college entry, Jeff applied only to Princeton University. His rationale was simple, “Einstein was there, for goodness sake!” He entered Princeton with impeccable scholastic credentials and majored in theoretical physics to follow in the footsteps of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. However, a short time after arriving at Princeton, he discovered that for the first time in his life he was not the most gifted student in the class. Biographer Mark Leibovich reported an interesting turning point in the direction of Jeff Bezos’ career path:
One night during his freshman year, Bezos was struggling over a partial differential equation he had to complete for a quantum mechanics class. After a few hours of frustration, he and his study partner visited the dorm room of a classmate, who glanced at the equation and said, “Cosine.”
“After we expressed some incredulousness,” Bezos says, “he proceeded to draw three pages of equations that flowed through and showed that it was cosine.” It led to a realization: There were people whose brains were wired to process abstract concepts in a very graceful way, and Bezos was not one of those people. “It was initially devastating,” he says, “very, very, troubling.”
This realization prompted him to re-direct his focus. He changed his major to electrical engineering and computer science. Once again, he excelled in the cognitive courses buttressed by abnormal intensity, competitiveness and a strong work ethic. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering and computer science and was subsequently elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
In 1994, the internet was emerging and Jeff, who was earning about $1,000,000 per year as a quant at the investment company D. E. Shaw, envisioned a bookstore in cyberspace where books could be bought and sold on line, bypassing the traditional processes of printing and shipping. So, Jeff quit his job in mid-1994 and told his wife Mackenzie that they were moving west but didn’t know where. He then called Moishe’s Moving Company and told them to take the furniture, drive west on I-80 and before they reached Dallas he would call them and tell them where to take their furniture. Bizarre? Perhaps. Such behavior was consistent with the Bezos analytical style. He had analyzed, by state, the sales tax on books and discerned that the best places for such a venture relative to taxes, shipping and a host of other variables were New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon or Washington. He worked on his business plan while his new wife drove and he ultimately decided on Seattle because his friend, Nick Hanauer, had told Jeff that Seattle was the center of the universe and also that he wanted to invest in Jeff’s new Internet business. A more detailed description of Jeff’s climb to success is accessible in Gene Landrum’s book Entrepreneurial Genius (see: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/entrepreneurial-genius/)
The story of Jeff Bezos’ climb to success from humble beginnings is one of the most interesting sagas in the annals of entrepreneurship. Between 1994 and the year 2017, Jeff’s dream had materialized in the behemoth known today as Amazon.com, and Jeff, according to Forbes Magazine of that year, had become the richest man in the world.
Reflecting on his decision to abandon his million-dollar-a-year job at D. E. Shaw and pursue his dream, he once described in an interview his regret minimization principle:
I knew that when I was eighty there was no chance that I would regret having walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus in the middle of the year…But I did think there was a chance that I might regret significantly not participating in this thing called the Internet, that I believed passionately in. I also knew that if I had tried and failed, I wouldn’t regret that. So, once I thought about it that way, it became incredibly easy to make that decision.
