Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos known as Jeff Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/ BAY-zohss, né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American business magnate best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company.
Jeffrey Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$ 211 billion as of July 16, 2024, according to Forbes. He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
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Jeff Bezos
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Jeff Bezos in 2017
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| Born |
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen
January 12, 1964 Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.
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| Education | Princeton University (BSE) |
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| Known for | Founding Amazon |
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| Spouse |
MacKenzie Scott
(m. 1993; div. 2019) |
| Partner(s) | Lauren Sánchez (2019–present; engaged) |
| Children | 4 |
| Parents |
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| Relatives | Mark Bezos (half-brother) |
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Bezos was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.
He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle.
The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
It is the world’s largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015 and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth; he flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021.
He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.
The first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index and the second ever to have eclipsed the feat since Bill Gates in 1999, Bezos was named the “richest man in modern history” after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018.
In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion.
On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon and took over the role of executive chairman. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as the CEO and president of Amazon.
Early life and education
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen.
At the time of Jeff’s birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19. Jorgensen was a Danish American unicyclist born in Chicago to a family of Baptists.
After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school, bringing her baby with her. Jeff attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque when he was 2.
Jorgensen drank and struggled financially. Jacklyn left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was 17-months-old.
After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel “Mike” Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Bezos adopted 4-year-old Jeff, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.
Gise, her husband and her son left the area and asked Jorgensen to discontinue contact, to which he agreed.
After Mike had received his degree from the University of New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon.
Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. Jeff’s maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.
Lawrence retired early to his family’s ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where his grandson would spend many summers in his youth and which he would later purchase and expand from 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) to 300,000 acres (121,406 ha).
Jeff displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger half-siblings out of his room.
The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School. In high school, he worked at McDonald’s as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift.
Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida. He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.
In his graduation speech, Bezos told the audience he dreamed of the day when mankind would colonize space. A local newspaper quoted his intention “to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park”.
After graduating from high school in 1982, Bezos attended Princeton University. He initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science.
On 13 September 2018, during a talk at The Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Bezos revealed that his classmate at Princeton Yasantha Rajakarunanayake who was of Sri Lankan origin,
Some 30 years ago had defeated him to solve a mathematical problem and as a result, Bezos himself admitted that he gave up his dreams of becoming a theoretical physicist.
Bezos was a member of the Quadrangle Club, one of Princeton’s 11 eating clubs. In addition, he was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).
He had a 4.2 GPA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), summa cum laude.
Personal life
In 1992, while Jeff Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan, he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later.
In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon. Bezos and his now ex-wife MacKenzie are the parents of four children: three sons, and a daughter adopted from China.
In March 2003, Bezos was a passenger in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas while surveying land to buy for Blue Origin; the other 3 occupants in the helicopter were pilot Charles “Cheater” Bella, Amazon lawyer Elizabeth Korrell, and local rancher Ty Holland.
All survived; Bezos sustained only minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.
Bezos portrayed a Starfleet official in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond, and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening.
He had lobbied Paramount for the role apropos of Alexa and his personal/professional interest in speech recognition.
His one line consisted of a response to an alien in distress: “Speak Normally.” In his initial discussion of the project which became Alexa with his technical advisor Greg Hart in 2011,
Bezos told him that the goal was to create “the Star Trek computer.” Bezos’s family corporation Zefram LLC is named after Zefram Cochrane, a character from Star Trek.
In January 2019, Bezos and his wife Mackenzie released a joint statement which revealed that they would be getting divorced after 25 years together.
Subsequently, National Enquirer revealed that Bezos had an affair with media personality Lauren Sánchez; the affair with Sánchez had lasted for months.
Later, Bezos published an online essay on February 7, 2019, in which he accused American Media, Inc. owner David Pecker of “extortion and blackmail” for threatening to publish intimate photos of Bezos and current girlfriend Lauren Sánchez,
if he did not stop his investigation into how his text messages and other photos had been leaked to the National Enquirer.
Media reports have accused Sánchez’s brother Michael of being the source for the photos obtained by National Enquirer; however, Bezos has speculated that it may have been the Saudi Arabian government.
On April 4, 2019, the divorce was finalized, with Bezos keeping 75% of the couple’s Amazon stock and MacKenzie getting the remaining 25% ($35.6 billion) in Amazon stock.
However, Bezos would keep all of the couple’s voting rights. On May 22, 2023, Sánchez and Bezos became engaged. He is the Honorary Chair of the Explorers Club.
Early career
After Jeff Bezos graduated from college in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others.
He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.
Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust from 1988 to 1990.
He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modeling from 1990 until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw’s fourth senior vice-president by age 30.
Wealth
Jeff Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997 after raising $54 million through Amazon’s initial public offering (IPO).
He was first included on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list in 1999 with an estimated net worth of $10.1 billion, which placed him in the 19th position in the world and 10th in the USA.
His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later, a 40.5% drop.
His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion. He lost $500 million the following year, which brought his net worth down to $1.5 billion.
| Annual estimates of Jeff Bezos’s net worth | |||||
| Year | Billions | Change | Year | Billions | Change |
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| 1999 | 10.1 |  0.0% |
2009 | 6.8 | 17.1% |
| 2000 | 6.1 | 40.5% |
2010 | 12.6 | 85.3% |
| 2001 | 2.0 | 66.6% |
2011 | 18.1 | 43.7% |
| 2002 | 1.5 | 25.0% |
2012 | 23.2 | 28.2% |
| 2003 | 2.5 | 66.6% |
2013 | 28.9 | 24.5% |
| 2004 | 5.1 | 104% |
2014 | 30.5 | 5.5% |
| 2005 | 4.1 | 19.6% |
2015 | 50.3 | 60.9% |
| 2006 | 4.3 | 5.1% |
2016 | 45.2 | 10.1% |
| 2007 | 8.7 | 102.3% |
2017 | 72.8 | 61.6% |
| 2008 | 8.2 | 5.7% |
2018 | 112.0 | 53.8% |
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Main data source: Forbes World’s Billionaires Estimates
Additional reference(s): Bloomberg Billionaires Index
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The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion. From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion. After the financial crisis and succeeding economic recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion—a 17.7% drop.
His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion. This percentage increase ascended him to the 43rd spot on the ranking from 68th.
After a rumor broke out that Amazon was developing a smartphone, Bezos’s net worth rose to $30.5 billion in 2014. A year later, he entered the top ten when he increased his net worth to a total of $50.3 billion.
Bezos rose to become the fifth richest person in the world hours before the market closed; he gained $7 billion in one hour.
By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion. However, just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion to $66.5 billion, unofficially ranking him the third-richest person in the world, behind Warren Buffett.
After sporadic jumps in Amazon’s share price, in July 2017 he briefly unseated Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world.
Bezos would continue to sporadically surpass Gates throughout the month of October 2017 after Amazon’s share price fluctuated.
His net worth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon’s share price increased by more than 2.5%. When the 2017 list was issued, Bezos’s net worth was registered at $72.8 billion, adding $27.6 billion from the previous year.
His wealth’s rapid growth from 2016 to 2017 sparked a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a controlled, reduced time scale.
On October 10, 2017, he made an estimated $6.24 billion in 5 minutes, slightly less than the then annual gross domestic product of Kyrgyzstan.
On March 6, 2018, Bezos was designated the wealthiest person in the world, with a registered net worth of $112 billion.
He unseated Bill Gates ($90 billion), who was $6 billion ahead of Warren Buffett ($84 billion), ranked third. He is considered the first registered centi-billionaire (not adjusted for inflation).
His wealth, in 2017–18 terms, equaled that of 2.7 million Americans. Bezos’s net worth increased by $33.6 billion from January 2017 to January 2018.
This increase outstripped the economic development (in GDP terms) of more than 96 countries around the world. During March 9, Bezos earned $230,000 every 60 seconds.
The Motley Fool estimated that if Bezos had not sold any of his shares from its original public offering in 1997, his net worth would sit at $181 billion in 2018.
According to Quartz, his net worth of $150 billion in July 2018 was enough to purchase the entire stock markets of Nigeria, Hungary, Egypt, Luxembourg, and Iran.
Following the report by Quartz, Amazon workers in Poland, (Germany), and Spain participated in demonstrations and labor strikes to draw attention to his growing wealth and the lack of compensation, labor rights, and satisfactory working conditions of select Amazon workers.
On July 17, 2018, he was designated the “wealthiest person in modern history” by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.
In 2019, Bezos’s wealth was reduced by the divorce from his wife MacKenzie Bezos.
According to Forbes, had the Washington state common law applied to their divorce without a prenuptial agreement,
Bezos’s wealth could have been equitably divided with his ex-wife; however, she eventually received 25% of Bezos’s Amazon shares, then valued at approximately $36 billion, making her the third-richest woman in the world.
Bezos retained his interest in The Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as voting control of the shares received by his ex-wife.
In June 2019, Bezos purchased three adjoining apartments overlooking Madison Square Park in Manhattan, including a penthouse, for a combined total of US$80 million, making this one of the most expensive real estate purchases within New York City in 2019.
Bezos had also purchased three adjoining apartments at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan for $7.65 million in 1999; he bought a fourth unit in that building for $5.3 million in 2012.
In February 2020, Bezos purchased the Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million, a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area.
The previous record high price of $150 million was paid by Lachlan Murdoch for the Chartwell Mansion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was reported that Bezos’s fortune had grown by $24 billion, citing a surge in demand from households on lockdown shopping on Amazon.
He further expanded his residential holdings in February 2022, purchasing a $16.13-million-dollar apartment at a 24-story boutique condominium, located across from Madison Square Park in the Flatiron neighborhood, where he already owns all the units on the top floors.
Bezos is the owner of the Y721, a luxury superyacht estimated to cost more than $500,000,000; it is the largest yacht in the world.
According to Forbes Bezos was the second-wealthiest person in America and the third-wealthiest person in the world in 2023.
Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth is about US$197 billion as of February 2024.
Criticism
Jeff Bezos is known for creating an adversarial environment at Amazon, as well as insulting and verbally abusing his employees.
As journalist Brad Stone revealed in his book The Everything Store, Bezos issued remarks to his employees such as “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”, “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”, and “Why are you ruining my life?”
Additionally, Bezos reportedly pitted Amazon teams against each other, and once declined to give Amazon employees city bus passes in order to discourage them from leaving the office.
Throughout his early years of ownership of The Washington Post, Bezos was accused of having a potential conflict of interest with the paper.
Bezos and the newspaper’s editorial board have dismissed accusations that he unfairly controlled the paper’s content, and Bezos maintains that the paper is independent.
Bezos’ treatment of employees at The Washington Post has also drawn scrutiny.
In 2018, more than 400 Washington Post employees wrote an open letter to Bezos criticizing his poor wages and benefits for his employees.
The letter demanded “Fair wages; fair benefits for retirement, family leave and health care; and a fair amount of job security”.
Around 750 employees at The Washington Post went on a brief strike in December 2023 in response to Bezos’ plans to lay off staff.
Public image
Journalist Nellie Bowles of The New York Times has described the public persona and personality of Jeff Bezos as that of “a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan”.
During the 1990s, Bezos earned a reputation for relentlessly pushing Amazon forward, often at the expense of public charity and social welfare.
Journalist Mark O’Connell criticized Bezos’s relentless customer focus as “very small” in terms of impact on humanity as a whole, a sentiment technologist Tim O’Reilly agreed with.
His business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon. In 1999, Bezos was worth $10 billion yet drove a 1996 Honda Accord.
Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy.
Bezos was seen by some as needlessly quantitative and data-driven.
This perception was detailed by Alan Deutschman, who described him as “talking in lists” and “[enumerating] the criteria, in order of importance, for every decision he has made.”
Select accounts of his persona have drawn controversy and public attention.
Notably, journalist Brad Stone wrote a book that described Bezos as a demanding boss as well as hyper-competitive, and opined that Bezos perhaps “bet the biggest on the Internet” than anyone else.
Bezos has been characterized as a notoriously opportunistic CEO who operates with little concern for obstacles and externalities.
During the early 2010s, Bezos solidified his reputation for aggressive business practices, and his public image began to shift. Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money.
His physical transformation has been compared to the transformation of Amazon; he is often referred to as the metonym of the company.
Since 2017, he has been portrayed by Kyle Mooney and Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live, usually as an undercutting, domineering figure.
His physical appearance increased the public’s perception of him as a symbolically dominant figure in business and in popular culture, wherein he has been parodied as an enterprising supervillain.
In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation named Bezos the “World’s Worst Boss”, with its general secretary Sharan Burrow saying: “Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model”,
while in 2019, Harvard Business Review, which ranked Bezos the best-performing CEO for 4 years in a row since 2014, did not rank him even in the top 100, citing Amazon’s “relatively low ESG (environment, social,
And governance) scores” that reflect “risks created by working conditions and employment policies, data security, and antitrust issues.”
During the late 2010s, Bezos reversed his reputation for being reluctant to spend money on non-business-related expenses.
His relative lack of philanthropy compared to other billionaires has drawn a negative response from the public since 2016.
Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a New York Times piece.
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Recognition
- In 1999, Bezos received his first major award when Time named him Person of the Year.
- In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America’s best leaders.
- Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.
- In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle.
- In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune.
- He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and the 2013 conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England.
- He was a member of the executive committee of The Business Council for 2011 and 2012, and appointed as chairman of the organization in 2014.
- 2014–2018, he was ranked the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.
- He has also figured in Fortune‘s list of 50 great leaders of the world for three straight years, topping the list in 2015.
- In September 2016, Bezos received a $250,000 prize for winning the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, which he donated to the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.
- In February 2018, Bezos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “leadership and innovation in space exploration, autonomous systems, and building a commercial pathway for human space flight”.
- In March 2018, at the Explorers Club annual dinner, he was awarded the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award in recognition of his work with Blue Origin.
- He received Germany’s 2018 Axel Springer Award for Business Innovation and Social Responsibility. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world on five separate occasions between 2008 and 2018.
- In 2019, Bezos was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, being awarded with the Jeff Bezos Freedom’s Wings Award and the Kenn Ricci Lifetime Aviation Entrepreneur Award.
- In February 2023, Bezos was presented with the Légion d’honneur, the highest French order of merit. Bezos had been designated a member of the Légion d’Honneur about 10 years earlier but was not available to collect it.
Politics
According to public campaign finance records, Jeff Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S. senators from Washington.
He has also supported Democrats U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham, U.S. senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presenting the USIBC Global Leadership Award to Bezos, in Washington, D.C. on June 7, 2016
Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, and in 2012 contributed $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage, a group supporting a yes vote on Washington Referendum 74,
which affirmed a same-sex marriage law enacted in the state.
Bezos donated $100,000 towards a movement against a Washington state income tax in 2010 for “top earners”.
In 2012, he donated to Amazon’s political action committee (PAC), which has given $56,000 and $74,500 to Democrats and Republicans, respectively.
After the 2016 presidential election, Bezos was invited to join Donald Trump’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board, an advisory council to improve the technology used by the Defense Department.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Bezos via Twitter, accused Bezos of avoiding corporate taxes, gaining undue political influence, and undermining his presidency by spreading “fake news”.
In 2014, Amazon won a bid for a cloud computing contract with the CIA valued at $600 million.
A 2018, $10 billion contract known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, this time with the Pentagon, was allegedly written up in a way that favors Amazon.
Controversy over this was raised when General James Mattis accepted a headquarters tour invitation from Bezos and co-ordinated the deal through Sally Donnelly, a lobbyist who previously worked for Amazon.
In November 2019, when the contract was awarded to Microsoft instead, Amazon filed a lawsuit with allegations that the bidding process was biased.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson meets with Bezos during the United Nations General Assembly, in New York City on September 20, 2021.
On July 6, 2021, the Pentagon canceled the JEDI contract with Microsoft, citing that “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs.”
Despite Bezos’s support for an open borders policy towards immigrants, Amazon has actively marketed facial recognition software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In 2019, a political action committee linked to Bezos spent over $1 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the reelection bid of Seattle city council member and activist Kshama Sawant.
On November 22, 2021, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million to the Obama Foundation to “help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders”, and requested the Obama Presidential Center’s plaza to be named after John Lewis.
Saudi hacking claim
In March 2018, Bezos met in Seattle with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.
In March 2019, Bezos’s security consultant accused the Saudi government of hacking Bezos’s phone.
According to BBC, Bezos’s top security staffer, Gavin de Becker, “linked the hack to the Washington Post‘s coverage of the murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul”.
Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and dissident, was employed as a writer at the Washington Post, owned by Bezos. Khashoggi was killed in late 2018 in Turkey’s Saudi consulate for his critical stance and journalism against the Saudi government and its leader.
In January 2020, The Guardian reported that the hack was initiated before the murder but after Khashoggi wrote critically about the crown prince in the Washington Post.
Forensic analysis of Bezos’s mobile phone conducted by advisory firm FTI Consulting,
concluded it “highly probable” that the hack was achieved using a malicious file hidden in a video sent in a WhatsApp message to Bezos from the personal account of the crown prince on May 1, 2018.
Saudi Arabia has denied the claim.
Philanthropy
jeff Bezos donated to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center several times between 2009 and 2017. In 2013, he pledged $500,000 to Worldreader, a non-profit founded by a former Amazon employee.
In September 2018, Business Insider reported that Bezos was the only one of the top five billionaires in the world who had not signed the Giving Pledge,
An initiative created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that encourages wealthy people to give away a majority of their wealth.
That same month, Janet Camarena, director of transparency initiatives at Foundation Center, was quoted by CNBC as having questions about Bezos’s new Day 1 Fund, including the fund’s structure and how exactly it will be funded.
In May 2017, Bezos gave $1 million to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides pro bono legal services for American journalists.
On June 15, 2017, he posted a message on Twitter asking for ideas for philanthropy: “I’m thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time—working on the long term”.
At the time of the post, Bezos’s lifetime spending on charitable causes was estimated to be $100 million. Multiple opinion columnists responded by asking Bezos to pay higher wages to Amazon warehouse workers.
A year later in June, he tweeted that he would announce two philanthropic foci by the end of summer 2018.
Bezos announced in September 2018 that he would commit approximately $2 billion to a fund to deal with American homelessness and establish a network of non-profit preschools for low income communities.
As part of this announcement, he committed to establishing the “Day 1 Families Fund” to finance “night shelters and day care centers for homeless families” and the “Day 1 Academies Fund” for early childhood education.
In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.
In June 2018, Bezos donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates aimed at promoting emissions-free energy.
In September 2018, Bezos donated $10 million to With Honor, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase the number of veterans in political office.
In February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund.
Later that year, in November, Bezos announced $791M of donations to established, well-known groups, with $100M each going to Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council,
The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund, and the remainder going to 11 other groups.
In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.
In November 2021, Bezos pledged to donate $2 billion towards restructuring food systems and nature conservation at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
In July 2021, Bezos announced Courage and Civility Award and donated $100 million each to lawyer Van Jones and chef José Andrés.
Next year, a $100-million to singer Dolly Parton in recognition of her charity work focused on improving children’s literacy around the world.
In March 2024, he donated $50 million each to actress Eva Longoria and retired admiral Bill McRaven.
Bezos Academy is a group of tuition-free preschools for students from low-income families, which was created by Bezos, and which operate in a manner similar to the Montessori method (but are not accredited as Montessori schools).
On November 22, 2022, Bezos awarded $123 million to organizations that are engaged in relocating homeless families to permanent housing.
Day 1 Families Fund grants, the amounts of which vary in monetary terms, will be sent to 40 organizations across the country.
