Bezos, Jeffrey Preston [key], 1964– American business executive and on-line retailing pioneer, b. Albuquerque, N.M., grad. Princeton (B.S.E., 1986). He worked in computer technology for several financial firms before founding (1994) Amazon.com, of which he is chairman and CEO. Headquartered in Seattle, Amazon.com grew from an Internet bookseller into an online emporium and one of the world's largest retailers, selling a wide variety of merchandise that is shipped from warehouses throughout the world; it also acts as a storefront for smaller retail businesses. The company has developed e-book readers (2007) and voice-activated personal assistant devices (2014), and also offers cloud computing services. Bezos also founded (2000) Blue Origin, a company devoted to rocket development and space tourism, with an emphasis on reusable rockets that take off and land vertically. He bought the Washington Post in 2013. In 2019 he accused American Media, owner of the National Enquirer, of extortion and blackmail for threatening to print private photos of him and his mistress unless he ceased investigating how the company obtained their private text messages, which it had published earlier that year. The value of his Amazon holdings has made Bezos one of the wealthiest persons in the world.
See B. Stone, The Everything Store (2013).
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