Jeff Bezos

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Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Jeff Bezos 2005
Born	January 12, 1964 (1964-01-12) (age 45) Albuquerque, New Mexico
Occupation	Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com
Net worth	▼US$6.8 billion (2009)

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is the American 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 & Co. before founding Amazon in 1994. He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.^[1] In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's Best Leaders.^[2]

[edit] Early life and background

Bezos' maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' 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. When a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.^[3]

Bezos was born when his mother, Jackie Bezos, was still in her teens. 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 migrated 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 4th to 6th grade.

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 privacy. 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.^[4] While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida; which helped him receive a Silver Knight Award in 1982.^[5] 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. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

[edit] Career

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. Then Bezos worked for Bankers Trust, becoming a vice-president. Later on he also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co.

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way and setting up the original company in his garage. ^[6] His work with Amazon eventually led him to become one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs. In 2004, he founded a human spaceflight startup company called Blue Origin.

Bezos is known for his attention to business process details. As described by Condé Nast's Portfolio.com, he "is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager. ... an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases." ^[6]

[edit] Artificial artificial intelligence

Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI) is a term coined by Jeff Bezos with reference to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Certain processing tasks, such as identifying whether a person in a photograph is male or female, are still performed better and faster by humans than computers. AI is not yet adequate to programming such tasks. The idea of AAI is to outsource those parts of a computer program to humans.^[7] AAI is the underlying principle behind Amazon Mechanical Turk.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Condé Nast Portfolio Executive Profile - Portfolio.com (August 2007)
• Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos - Fastcompany.com (August 2004)
• TED Talks: Jeff Bezos on the next web innovation at TED in 2003