American billionaire, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. Born around 1964, he watched the Apollo 11 moon landings in 1969 at the age of five, sparking a lifelong obsession with space. Before founding Amazon in 1994, he worked at a hedge fund; he left after applying what he calls the "regret-minimisation framework"—limiting the number of things he would wish he had done differently at 80.
Bezos retired as boss of Amazon in 2021, handing day-to-day leadership to Andy Jassy. He remains executive chairman. He holds an 8.6% stake in the company, worth roughly $200bn, making him one of the world's richest people with a fortune of around $240bn. Amazon employs over 1m Americans and is worth $2.7trn. In The Economist's ranking of the most powerful business tycoons in American history across 11 technological waves, Bezos came fourth.
Since leaving Amazon, Bezos has devoted approximately 90% of his time to Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000. He wholly owns the company but does not run it day to day; that falls to David Limp, recruited from Amazon in 2023, where Limp had overseen the Alexa digital assistant, Kindle and Project Kuiper satellite-broadband initiative. Bezos is described as a de facto co-CEO and troubleshooter-in-chief.
Bezos Expeditions, his family office, oversees roughly $108bn in assets—comparable to Ohio's state pension fund. Past investments included early stakes in Airbnb, Twitter and Uber. Current bets include Skild AI and Physical Intelligence (robotic AI), RIVR Technologies (mechanical robotics), Synchron (brain-computer interfaces), General Fusion (fusion energy), NotCo (AI plant-based meat) and Atlas Data Storage (synthetic DNA data storage).
The Bezos Earth Fund, a $10bn charity, is dedicated to keeping the planet habitable.
Bezos regularly caps his salary and bonus at around $80,000—low enough to make him eligible for the child tax credit, which he has claimed. He can afford to forgo a traditional salary because he is richly compensated by the growing value of his shareholdings. By using stock as collateral for loans, billionaires such as Bezos can free up capital to support lavish lifestyles without triggering a taxable event. A leak of Internal Revenue Service data revealed that Bezos has been able to pay little or no income tax in certain years, entirely legally.
In June 2025 Bezos married Lauren Sánchez, a former television presenter, spending an estimated $50m to rent Venice for three days for the wedding. He also owns the Washington Post, which announced it would lay off a third of its journalists to stem losses.
I'm still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.