Bernard Ryan - Jeff Bezos: Business Executive and Founder of Amazon.com

Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, became one of the world's wealthiest people by age 33.

Source: Associated Press.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His name (pronounced BAY-zohs) comes from the Spanish word besos, meaning kisses. His mother, Jackie Gise, was married at 17 but divorced soon after Jeff's birth. His grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise (who was always called Preston), was appointed by the U.S. Congress as manager of the western region of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He was responsible for laboratories in Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos, where 26,000 people worked.

Jeff's mother met Mike Bezos while she worked in an Albuquerque bank. He was a native of Cuba who had been one of more than 14,000 children brought to the United States between 1960 and 1962 in Operation Pedro Pan (Peter Pan)-a rescue mission in Miami, Florida, that placed children in foster care. Living in Delaware, Mike Bezos learned English, earned his high school diploma, moved on to college at the University of Albuquerque, and got a job at the bank where he later met Jackie.

By the time Jeff was three, his mother knew she had an extremely smart and determined son on her hands. He was asking for a real bed rather than the crib he still slept in. She said no. Soon she found him using a screwdriver to take his crib apart. And it was not long before the teachers in Jeff's Montessori school told her they had never seen such concentration in a child. They often found it impossible to distract Jeff from his current task, so to get the boy to move from one activity to another they simply picked up his chair with him in it and moved it to the next assignment.

Mike Bezos and Jackie Gise married in 1968 and Mike adopted Jeff. Jeff's half-sister, Christina, was born in 1970, and his half-brother, Mark, in 1971. The family lived first in Houston, Texas, where Mike worked as a petroleum engineer for Exxon.

Jeff was 10 when Mike and Jackie told him that Mike was not his natural father. The news did not bother him at all. "It's a fine truth to have out there," he said later on. "I'm not embarrassed by it. As far as I'm concerned, my Dad is my natural father. The only time I ever think about it, genuinely, is when a doctor asks me to fill out a form."

By the time he was 10, Jeff was spending summers in southwest Texas on the ranch of his beloved grandfather, Preston Gise. Known to Jeff as "Pop," he had retired near the small town of Cotulla, west of San Antonio and near the Mexican border. His keen technical mind and his devotion to his grandson made Pop Gise an ideal mentor for a boy whose own mind welcomed every gadget he could get his hands on.

Pop Gise recognized in his grandson a fellow scientist, young as he was, and never failed to bring along educational toys and games when he came to visit. He helped his grandson build Heathkit amateur radios and contributed to a growing collection of paraphernalia that threatened to burst the walls of the Bezos garage. Among the projects in various stages of construction or development were an old Hoover vacuum cleaner on the way to becoming a simple hovercraft and an open umbrella that, dressed in aluminum foil, was part of an experiment in solar cooking. "His projects became more complex with age," said Jeff's mother, "but unfortunately the garage never got any bigger."

She did draw the line, however. Jeff, not yet in high school, announced that he had to have a contraption called an Infinity Cube, in which motorized mirrors gave the viewer the sense of staring into infinity. Finding that it cost $20, Mrs. Bezos said no, it was too expensive. For well under $20, Jeff rounded up all the needed parts and built the cube for himself. Jeff also made a bedroom burglar alarm that would alert him if either of his siblings went there.

But not everything in his young life was technical. Like many kids, he naturally wanted to play football even though he had a slight build. His parents enlisted him in the youth league-for boys not yet in high school-where his weight was just enough to get him in. They worried that the bigger boys would squash him, but soon learned that the coach had made Jeff the captain of the defensive team. When they asked why, the coach explained that Jeff carefully memorized not only his assignment on every play but everybody else's, too.

Before Jeff entered high school, Exxon transferred Mike Bezos and his family to Miami, Florida. Now a young teenager, Jeff got plenty of physical exercise during his summers on the Cotulla ranch. There Pop Gise taught him how to use an arc welder and lay irrigation pipe, fix windmills and pumps, build a barn, work cattle on horseback and take them to auction, and rope calves and brand them with his grandfather's LAZY G (the ranch's symbol). One summer the ranch's big D6 Caterpillar bulldozer broke down. Studying a pile of mail-order manuals three feet high, Jeff helped Pop fix it. "On a ranch in the middle of nowhere," he later said, "you have to have a lot of patience."

Jeff's mother echoed his attitude. Thinking about how her son's experience on the ranch taught him to make his own decisions and rely on himself, she later said that one of the things he learned "is that there really aren't any problems without solutions. Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they're obstacles. Otherwise, they're opportunities."