Jeff Bezos

The heavy-smoker grandmother was sitting at the front seat of the van keeping her chain-smoking streak alive. Her 10-year-old grandson sitting next to her remembered an article that he had read a few days ago: Each cigarette shortens life by five minutes.

After a quick calculation, he said “Your life got 100 minutes shorter today. It makes 36,500 minutes per year. You steal 24 days from your life each year. You are going to die young,” which made the grandmother burst into tears.

The grandfather stopped the van, asked his grandson to step outside and taught him the lesson of his life.

“Yes, you are very clever,” said the grandfather and continued: “This is great but being kind in life is always harder than being clever. One day you will understand that.”

The richest man in the world, who has recently gone through the most expensive divorce in human history, Jeff Bezos tells this story as the defining lesson of his life. He used to spend the summers in his grandfather’s farm in Texas both during his childhood and during adolescence, looking after the cattle and repairing tractors.

We are talking about a fortune of 137 billion dollars when we refer him as the richest man in the world. Let’s learn a bit more about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, which is the second company in the world to have reached a turnover of $1bn totally following Apple.

Jeffrey Preston Jorgenson was born in 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother was 17 and his 18-year-old father was a high school student. His father had a bicycle shop and dreams of being an actor… He left home when his son was very little in pursuit of such dreams. Jeffrey was only four when his mother got married with the Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos after the divorce. Miguel adopted Jeffrey and the family moved to Houston.

He used to repair and try to invent things even when he was a kid. The alarm he invented for his siblings not to disturb him when doing homework was one of them. He learnt that Miguel wasn’t his biological father when he was 10.

They weren’t a wealthy family. They weren’t even middle class. He had to work at a McDonald’s restaurant while he was studying at a gifted children high school from which he graduated ranking at the top of his class.

He studied computer and electronic engineering at Princeton University. When he finished school, he worked at various jobs for seven years one of which was investment banking.

The D E Shaw company changed his life. He met there his wife with whom he is about to divorce with a heavy maintenance payment. When D E Shaw rejected his suggestion of selling books online, he decided to do it on his own. Bad neighbours make one a homeowner, and having a bad boss makes one a businessman!

He was looking for a name in the dictionary starting with A. The Amazon river in South America had both the first and last letters of the alphabet. And his intention was selling all books from A to Z. When he started working in the garage of his house, he was hoping that his company would be as large as the Amazon river. With the $300,000 he took from his parents he founded the Amazon.

He had to make 60 different interviews just to get an investment of $1m.

Bezos tells about how the whole adventure started saying “I raised funds from 22 people, each giving me $50,000. It would have been the end of the story for me if I had not been able to gather all that money. It was 1995 and the first question of  the investors was ‘What is Internet’.”

His investors were honest enough to warn him that Amazon faced a 70% chance of failure. He held firm to the 30% chance of success only and followed it through. He had foreseen the future when books and many other things would be sold online.

He was packing the books himself in the garage and even delivering them with his van. His author wife MacKenzie was keeping the books. He only had 10 other employees at his disposal.

Business was going well. So much so that his knees started to hurt due to all that squatting to pack books. He got an unexpected response when he said to one of his employees, “This can’t go on, we must buy knee pads.”

“Boss,” said the employee, “We have to buy a packing desk rather than knee pads.”

He took the advice and saw the increase in efficiency. Three years later, he was advised to take his company public, which he assented to.

Jeff Bezos ranks among the people who could change the world, according to Forbes.

And so he did. After Amazon, he launched Kindle, an e-book reader, in 2007.

In a period when everyone was saying “Paper is dying”, he acquired the Washington Post newspaper in 2013 for $250m. He emphasized the importance of content. Indeed, content was the king regardless of the means.

Delivery by drones, sending tourists to space are ordinary dreams to him…

He owes his space company Blue Origin to his dreams, too. Even though he couldn’t make his dream of sending the first tourist to space in 2018 come true, it is just around the corner.

He had a minor role in the movie Star Trek Beyond in 2016 as an ‘alien’.

He is looking for old NASA rockets in a submarine. And he is sharing that strange hobby with his children…