Image via Complex Original
When's the last time you bought something on Amazon? Now think of every time you've bought something on Amazon. (If you're an Amazon Prime user, it might be way too much to count.)
Amazon changed the way we buy things, not just on the Internet, but in the physical world as well. The company stuck a dagger into the heart of brick and mortar bookstores across the country, and twisted that same dagger when they introduced their e-book readers. Who do we have to thank for all of this? Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, current CEO and chairman. The man turns 50 tomorrow, and has led one very interesting life. He's survived a helicopter crash, was airlifted from the Galapagos Islands for a medical emergency, and quit his job on Wall Street to work on Amazon. But there are many more things about the man who is continually shaping our world and the way we purchase goods.
Here are 50 Things You Didn't Know About Jeff Bezos.
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His middle name is Preston.
Bezos was named the vice president of D.E. Shaw in 1990 at age 26, the youngest ever.
He quit four years later to venture into e-commerce, opening up an online bookstore that would eventually become Amazon.
Today, he owns a 19-percent stake in Amazon.
Amazon did more than $67 billion in sales in 2013.
In the spring of 1994, he flew to LA to attend the American Booksellers Convention to learn the ins and outs of the book business.
A long term goal of his since childhood is to take humans to another planet.
When he decided to build Amazon, he told his wife they were moving to Seattle to have better access to a book wholesaler and to computer talent he would need for the project.
Bezos and his first employee, Shel Kaphan, set up a bell to ring everytime they made a sale. They had to turn it off pretty quickly.
Amazon was built by Bezos and Shel in a garage.
He wanted to name Amazon "Cadabra" at first. Or "MakeItSo.com."
He finally settled on Amazon.com after coming across is in the dictionary, and he liked that he had both an "A" and "Z" in the word.
This is what Amazon used to look like.
In 2012, Bezos and his wife pledged $2.5 million to defend Washington's gay marriage law.
He invited 300 friends to beta the test site before it launched.
Amazon's first meetings took place at a Barnes & Noble.
In 1995, Bezos opened the Amazon site to the world. Within 30 days, it had sales of $20,000 a week.
Before finding his wife, he would tell people he wanted a woman who would be able to get him out of a third-world prison.
"What I really wanted was someone resourceful. But nobody knows what you mean when you say, 'I'm looking for a resourceful woman.' If I tell somebody I'm looking for a woman who can get me out of a Third World prison, they start thinking Ross Perot - Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! - they have something they can hang their hat on! Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful." -Jeff Bezos
Within three years of releasing the Kindle, Amazon's sales of e-books surpassed the sales of real books.
He was employed at McDonald's for a summer and hated it.
He played pee wee football and was made captain because he was the only one to remember the plays.
Bezos was featured in the book "Turning on Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas," when he was 12.
It said he was "not particularly gifted in leadership."
He castrated cattle and did farmwork as a child on his grandparents farm.
In 2003, he almost died in a helicopter crash in Texas.
His laugh is famous and infamous.
"We are culturally pioneers. We like to disrupt even our own business. Other companies have different cultures and sometimes don't like to do that. Our job is to bring those industries along."
[via Wired]
Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field after he graduated Princeton in 1986.
This is his wife.
They have four children together.
*That's Bezos as a child.
His wife left an Amazon review about a book about him she didn't like.
"The book is also full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction, and the result is a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon."
Bezos was named Businessperson of The Year by 'Fortune' in 2012.
The Economist gave Bezos an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle.
Bezos has a honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University from 2008.
'Time' magazine name him their Person of the Year in 1999.
Bezos' net worth is $33 billion as of 2013.
He was airlifted off the Galapagos Islands because he was suffering from kidney stones.
Bezos Six Core Values include: customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar and innovation.
Bezos' Amazon was one of the first to incorporate one-click shopping and email order verification.
As an early teen, he rigged the family fire alarm in order to keep his siblings out of his room.
As a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver.
In December, he revealed "Amazon Prime Air," an army of remote controlled machines that provide delivery services to customers.
Yearly sales for Amazon jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to $17 billion in 2011.
Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million.
He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University majoring in computer science and electrical engineering.
In high school, he started his first business, the DREAM Institute, a summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. It cost $600 per child.
His attitude his Steve Jobs-esque. He's known for saying things like "why are you wasting my life?" and "are you lazy or incompetent?"
He's adopted but his biological father is one of Albuquerque's best unicyclists.
Zodiac sign: Capricorn.
He has a willingness to be misunderstood.
"Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, 'Are they right?' And if they are, you need to adapt what they're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention." -Jeff Bezos