Jeff Bezos: The World-Changing Entrepreneur

By Chris McNab

What was the key to Jeff Bezos's success? This biography takes a deep-dive into his career and the decisions he made to become the world's most successful business magnate.

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is a success story of the business world. The executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, he became the first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index and one of the world's most recognisable names in modern history. This book explores his empire of achievement and how his vision and hands-on efforts have led him from a start-up in his garage to his legacy today.

Featuring photographs which chronicle his rise to success, this book is fascinating read for aspiring entrepreneurs or anyone looking to build a successful business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398821712

Chris McNab

CHRIS McNAB is a writer and editor who specialises in military history and technology. He is an author of many internationally bestselling books on weapons and warfare, including titles in the Battle Story series on Verdun and Cambrai, as well as The World War I Story (all The History Press) i, as well as The Great Book of Guns; How to Survive Anything, Anywhere; The Illustrated History of the Vietnam War; Modern Military Uniforms; The SAS Mental Endurance Handbook; and Special Forces Survival Guide.

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Introduction

It seems safe to say, without the risk of creating a hagiography, that Jeff Bezos is one of the most extraordinary individuals of the modern age. Some caution goes with this claim. The biographer of any great public figure can be easily seduced into oversubscribing agency to all the twists and turns of their subject’s story. Much of life, after all, is a pinball-like experience, bouncing between disconnected events and random decisions. Only with memory and retelling are these episodes stitched together into a clean narrative with direction and purpose. At the same time, it is easy to underplay the statistical possibility of success in a world of near-infinite human games – maybe, after all, this individual was simply the lucky one. In logical modelling, we call this error ‘survival bias’. Here, the observer automatically selects rare high-achievers and attributes causation to all their moves on the chessboard, seeing their actions as the secret sauce to success. The problem is that the vast majority of individuals who don’t achieve greatness are largely invisible; the fact that some might have taken almost identical actions but still failed isn’t taken into account. Single causes largely beyond the entrepreneur’s control – a parent who falls ill for a few months, a single misguided acquisition, a sudden legal threat, a fire at a warehouse – can initiate the destructive countdown that ultimately leads to bankruptcy and boarded-up windows. We as observers like to whistle while we pass this truly vast graveyard, preferring to focus on the encouraging signs of those few who soared to the heavens.

So, a biography of Jeff Bezos runs the risk of ignoring survival bias, not least because Bezos cut his entrepreneurial teeth at a truly distinctive time in world history. During the 1980s and 1990s, our planet began the rocket-ride of technological revolution, as the personal computer and the internet together began reshaping the fabric of the modern age, right down to the ways we behave as societies and think as individuals. Bezos was fortuitously born at just the right time to intersect with this moment, stepping aboard as the aircraft was taxiing out to the runway for take-off. Various other factors gave an advantage: a loving and academically encouraging family environment; exposure to stimulating ideas and technologies; connections built up at Princeton and in business. In many ways, Bezos’ first two decades of life ensured that he sat in the equivalent of a planetary ‘Goldilocks Zone’, the optimal location for potential future prosperity.

But when we remind ourselves of the sheer scale of what Bezos has achieved, the normal equations applied to working out the success formula seem almost to melt away. On 5 July 2021, Jeff Bezos stepped down as the CEO of the company he had created, Amazon, Inc. At that point, if Bezos took a moment of pause to reflect on what he had created, what would he see? In a world of an estimated 24 million e-commerce companies, Amazon occupied the unchallenged summit, with an annual revenue of nearly $470 billion (a figure accurate for the full year of 2021). In fact, Amazon is in the Top 5 largest companies on the planet, jostling with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Saudi Arabian Oil. Amazon truly became the ‘everything store’ Bezos intended it to be – at the time of writing this book, it is estimated that the company is offering the public about 12 million products stocked by Amazon itself, expanding to 350 million product lines when we include the contributions of Marketplace sellers. In 2021, Amazon Prime alone had 200 million paid members worldwide and in 2019, a peak year, Amazon received 2.79 billion visitors. Through Amazon, the public can buy everything from baked beans to medical supplies, chainsaws to camping tents, baby toys to high-fashion handbags. For huge swathes of the world’s population, including the author, Amazon is literally the first click when it comes to buying almost anything. The success of the retail business has also grown for more than two million third-party sellers around the world who chose to sell in the Amazon store, many of which are small- and medium-sized businesses. These businesses account for roughly 60 per cent of sales in the Amazon store.

But under Bezos’ rudder Amazon became so, so much more than an online shop on a massive scale. It is now present in bricks-and-mortar high-street stores, including revolutionary ‘Just Walk Out’ technology-enabled stores in which the customer doesn’t even negotiate a checkout. Amazon Publishing now publishes its own books, and Amazon also provides the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) self-publishing service; official figures for the numbers of self-published KDP works are not available, but even by 2016 they were reported to be more than a million. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services (according to Statista data for 2021, it holds 33 per cent of the cloud computing market) and live streaming – a commercial entity that supplies the digital infrastructure to thousands of companies and government agencies and billions of transactions, and whose reach touches our daily lives in more ways than we might conceive. Amazon has become an internationally respected player in film and TV, producing original content through Amazon Studios (in March 2021, films released by Amazon Studios received 12 Oscar nominations) and more than 200 million Prime members streamed viewings of TV programmes in 2021. Millions of Amazon-produced electronic devices – Kindles, Fire Sticks, Echo smart speakers – sit in hands or homes. Amazon has vast subsidiaries and investments, in industries or markets such as satellites, autonomous vehicles and computer hardware.

If we need a further marker of Amazon’s big bang expansion then we can point to the fact that when Amazon first launched in 1994 it used a domestic garage as its warehouse; today, it has hundreds of giant logistics facilities around the world and 1.3 million employees. Twenty-two countries have their own dedicated Amazon platforms (at the time of writing: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands, Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Poland), but Amazon can reach customers in more than 100 other countries through its international direct shipping. Amazon is in our rooms and pockets, on our desktops, through our letterboxes, driving our businesses.

Attempting to summarize Amazon’s scale and achievements is always a rather breathless activity, never quite fully conveying the scale of what is, after all, one of the biggest commercial success stories in all history, not just modern times. But what is extraordinary is that Amazon is no longer the only definer of Bezos’ relentless achievements. In addition, he has built one of the world’s leading space exploration programmes, Blue Origin, and personally travelled into space inside one of his own spacecraft. He has created multi-billion-dollar philanthropic foundations, created a network of new schools, owns the Washington Post, has invested in hundreds of different companies, has sunk billions into technology R&D and, for good measure, is building a clock that ticks for 10,000 years.

All the above has famously brought Jeff Bezos untold riches. In July 2018, Bezos was named the ‘richest man in modern history’, when his net worth hit $150 billion – this rose to $200 billion in 2020. Bezos’ wealth has become an obsessive lens through which the public views the man. (In an interesting aside, it should be noted that Jeff Bezos has not taken any additional Amazon shares since the company’s founding; the growth in his wealth has largely rested upon the increase in the value of those shares.) But the personal wealth of Jeff Bezos, as I hope this biography will show, is in many ways a poor metric by which to measure his success. Far better is to concentrate our focus on how he made his mark on this planet. How does he think? How does he innovate? How does he manage teams, time, money and risk? By exploring such questions, and many more, we see Bezos’ wealth more as an outcome than as a goal, which is largely the way Bezos sees it himself. Once we move past the wealth, we are more open to view the lessons of an extraordinary life.

Chapter 1

Entry Point

The Greek philosopher Aristotle once famously said, ‘Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.’ Subsequent centuries of science and psychology have largely corroborated this observation, demonstrating that a child’s early-years environment lays the solid foundations, or not, of their subsequent intellectual and emotional development. Even in extreme youth, however, there are points of decision and redirection. In the case of one young man destined for greatness, we can identify a clear fork in the road at the age of four.

The start

Jeff Bezos was born on 12 January 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, Jacklyn Gise, was just 16 when she fell pregnant, still a sophomore at high school. As her tender years suggest, the pregnancy was the unplanned outcome of a youthful romance. Jackie (as she is known) had fallen for one Theodore (Ted) Jorgensen, a charismatic 18-year-old and school senior. Ted’s family hailed from Chicago, although he could trace his ancestry back to Danish immigrant grandparents. The Jorgensen family moved to Albuquerque when Ted was still in his single-digit years and it was there Jackie encountered him – a teenager straining against his early adult years. The attraction might have been assisted by Ted’s unusual skill as a unicyclist – no mere pastime, but rather a professional pursuit. Ted had considerable talent atop the single wheel, whether riding backwards, on a high wire, or in formation with the other members of his performing troupe, the Unicycle Wranglers, appearing in shows, fairs, circuses (including major branded circuses such as the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey) and other events across the United States.

With the unexpected pregnancy, the high-school romance between Jackie and Ted ran full-force into the wall of reality. Jackie at least had the security of a solid family, one that would also have a seminal intellectual and emotional importance in the life of her son. Her father Lawrence Preston Gise, affectionally known as ‘Pop’ to family and close friends, and her mother Mattie gave Jackie an emotional bedrock. Lawrence was a professional man, a regional director in the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the organization formed in 1946 to take control of American atomic science research and facilities. Mattie’s family had a 25,000-acre ranch near Cotulla, Texas. Three elements brought to the table by his maternal grandparents – loving nature, scientific interest and a physical space to explore – would become shaping forces on the young Jeff as he made his way through to adulthood.

For the teenage Jackie and Ted, life started throwing up problems, for which Jackie found imperfect but practical solutions. Before their child arrived, they married, although the legalities associated with their age meant they did so in Juàrez, Mexico, Jackie’s family providing the financial means to make the journey. In Albuquerque, the couple rented a small apartment, the first home to their new arrival, Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. The boy came into an environment characterized by the tensions of young people forced to adopt the trappings of serious adulthood before their time. Money was almost inevitably tight, despite financial assistance from Jackie’s family. Ted’s unicycling profession proved incompatible with his new responsibilities and he ended up grinding through a series of low-paid jobs, plus some failed attempts at furthering his educational status. The writing was on the wall – Jackie ended up moving back home with her parents and she filed for divorce when Jeff was just 17 months old. Thus the two separated, and Ted drifted out of Jeff’s life for good.

Ted Jorgensen died in 2015, at the age of 70. Across his life, his literal and mental distance from Jeff had been profound. He was tracked down in 2012 by journalist Brad Stone, who found Ted running a bicycle-repair shop in Arizona. Almost inconceivably, he had no idea of the path his son’s life had followed. Upon learning the truth, he expressed regret for and recognition of his failings as a young man and had no desire to reimpose himself on his grown son’s life.

For Jackie, however, her time was now refocused on family-supported efforts to bring up her young son. Despite her situation, Jackie would from the outset consistently prove her capability as a protective (but not overly so) and determined mother, dedicated to the well-being and advancement of her boy. Through Jeff’s growth years, she fanned the flames of her son’s interests, fought his corner, believed in his capacities. While we should avoid any suggestion of biographical predestination, in many ways it is difficult to imagine Jeff’s life having the same prodigious outcomes had he not had such a redoubtable and loving mother.

But she would not raise Jeff alone. An uptick in Jackie’s fortune came when she started dating again, this time one Miguel ‘Mike’ Bezos. Miguel was a Cuban immigrant, one of 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children aged between 6 and 18 who were brought over to the United States to escape their parents’ fears of life under the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro. This movement was code-named Operation Pedro Pan, and it brought a tide of confused, scared, Spanish-speaking youth washing on to US shores, the children funnelled into large settlement camps and instructional centres. Miguel, as with all the children, had been separated from his parents, although the connection with family was partly maintained when he met up with his cousin, also an immigrant, and the two became inseparable. Much of the acclimation work for Pedro Pan was run by the Catholic Church, and Miguel and his cousin were fortunate that they came under the enlightened discipline of Father James Byrnes, who ran the Case de Sales home for 21 boys at 1300 Broom Street in Wilmington, Delaware. Byrnes ensured that all the children under his care were educated at the local Salesianum School, had a structured existence, and felt a sense of belonging and worth. The old truism ‘What goes around comes around’ is apt here. In June 2021, the Salesianum School in Wilmington – the evolution of the original home – received a $12 million endowment from Miguel and Jackie (shareholders in Amazon), $10 million of which was to go towards funding a total of 24 full scholarships, under the appropriately titled ‘Rev. James P. Byrnes, OSFS Scholarship’. Regrettably, James Byrnes himself had died in 2020.

A young and smartly dressed Jeff Bezos poses with his mother, Jacklyn Bezos. Jacklyn was just 16 when she fell pregnant with Jeff and would remain a stable and devoted presence throughout his childhood.

Miguel met Jackie when he took a part-time job as a clerk in the Bank of New Mexico, supporting himself as he attended the first year of study at the University of Albuquerque in the mid-1960s. Jackie was there holding down a job as a bookkeeper. Romance blossomed across overlapping shifts and struggling communications (Miguel was still working on his English), building up to their marriage in April 1968.

Miguel, or ‘Mike’ as he became known, would prove to be a blessing for both Jackie and her son. He was a hard-working and responsible husband and father, with a determined work ethic and an aptitude for engineering that landed him