Last week, the CEO and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, became the richest man in the world. According to Forbes, he's worth at least $90 billion and he took the title from Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, all thanks to the recent jump in Amazon's stock value.
Bezos was not born a billionaire. As a matter of fact, he comes from a broken family with a deadbeat dad and a teenage mom. He did not set out in life to be the leader of a massive e-commerce juggernaut.
Born on the 12th of January, 1964, Jeff Bezos’s real name is Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. Ted Jorgensen, Jeff's biological dad, started dating his mom, Jacklyn Gise, during their high school years. Ted was 18 back then and Jacklyn was only 16. In the same year, she became pregnant so they flew to Mexico to get married, bringing with them their parent’s money.
Ted worked for $1.25/hr at a Mexican retail store so he did not have enough money for the three of them. According to Brad Stone, a biographer who wrote a book about Jeff Bezos, Ted had a drinking problem. When Jeff was 17 months old, his parents got a divorce.
In 1968, Jeff's mother married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban who only knew one English word: "hamburger." Ted's biological father agreed to let Miguel adopt his son. By the age of 4, Jeffrey Jorgensen became Jeffrey Bezos.
Stone suggests that Bezos’s childhood may have had a contribution to his great desire to succeed.
"Of course, it’s unknowable whether his birth's unusual circumstances helped create that fecund entrepreneurial mixture of ambition, intelligence, and the need to prove his self-worth. Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, 2 other icons in the technology industry, were adopted. A lot say that this gave them a powerful motivation and reason to succeed."
Growing up, Jeff spent many of his summers at the ranch of his grandparents in Texas. According to him, he helped vaccinate cattle, fix windmills, and a couple more chores. He also watched soap operas with his grandparents.
Bezos and his grandparents loved to have road trips together. In a speech he gave in 2010 at Princeton, he said his grandparents were part of the Caravan Club which is a group of trailer owners who drive around Canada and the US together.
"We would hitch up our trailer to my granddad's car and off we would go. I worshipped and loved my grandparents. I looked forward to our road trips when I was young," said Bezos.
Fast forward to today, Bezos does not only own Amazon but also The Washington Post and a space-travel company, Blue Origin. And yet, even though he’s worth billions of dollars, he’s still driving a 1996 Honda Accord.
When he was asked if there were changes in his life since he became rich, he said that there had not been any personally. The only difference is that he now has more money in the bank.
