After Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1987, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others.[26]He first worked at Fitel, a financial telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.[27] Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter.[28] He transitioned into the banking industry when he was hired months later as a product manager at Bankers Trust; he worked there from 1988 to 1990.[28] He worked at D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund, from 1990 to 1994, where he eventually served as its fourth senior vice president at the age of 30.[28][26]
Amazon
Bezos (center) at a cooperative for robotics in 2005
In late 1993, Bezos decided to start an online bookstore.[29] He left his job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on July 5, 1994, after writing up its business plan on a trip from New York to Seattle.[30][31] Bezos named his new company "Amazon" after the Amazon River in South America, in part because the name begins with the letter "A," which is at the beginning of the alphabet.[32]He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.[31] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.[33] Although Amazon was originally an online bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other products.[28][32]Three years after Bezos founded Amazon, he moved to take it public with an initial public offering (IPO).[34] In response to critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained that the growth of the Internet would overtake market competition from larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.[32]
Bezos with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014
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Bezos receives the James Smithson Bicentennial medal in 2016 for his work with Amazon.
In 1998, Bezos advocated for enterprise diversification when he initiated the online sale of music and video; by the end of the year, he had also expanded the company's products to include a variety of consumer goods.[32] Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's equity offering to finance aggressive acquisition of smaller or competing firms.[32] In 2002, Bezos led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled data from weather channels and website traffic.[32] During late 2002, rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress after revenues stagnated.[35] Bezos borrowed $2 billion from select banks with only $350 million in holdings.[36] After the company nearly went bankrupt, he closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon workforce.[36] In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial instability and turned a profit of $400 million.[37] In November 2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle.[38] According to a 2008 Time profile, Bezos wished to create the same flow statefound in video game simulations in books; he wished readers would fully engage with books.[39] In 2013, Bezos secured a $600 million dollar contract with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web Services.[40] In October that year, Amazon was named as the largest online shopping retailer in the world.[41]
On Saturday, August 15, 2015, The New York Times published an article that described Amazon's business practices.[42] Bezos responded to his employees with a Sunday memo,[43] in which he rebutted the article's inferences that the company was an emotionally destitute workplace. Bezos said that anyone who believed that the story was true should contact him directly.[44] In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than one million shares of his holdings in the company for $671 million, making it the largest amount of money he had ever raised in a sale of his Amazon holdings.[45]
On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares at a value of $756.7 million.[46] A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employess when he initiated widespread hiring sprees across company distribution centers.[47] On January 19, 2018, his holdings in Amazon stock appreciated to slightly over $109 billion; months later he began to sell stock to raise cash for other enterprises, in particular, Blue Origin.[48] On January 29, 2018, he was featured in Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.[49] On February 1, 2018, Amazon reported its highest ever profit with quarterly earnings of $2 billion.[50] Due to the proliferation of Alibaba in China, Bezos has continuously expressed interest in expanding Amazon across India.[51]
In March 2018, Bezos dispatched Amit Agarwal, Amazon's point person, to the country, with $5.5 billion to localize operations throughout their supply chain routes.[52] Later in the month, U.S. President Donald Trumpaccused Amazon–and Bezos in particular–of sales tax avoidance, misusing postal routes, and anti-competitive business practices.[53]Amazon's share price fell by 9% in response to the president's negative comments; this reduced Bezos's personal wealth by $10.7 billion.[54] Weeks later, Bezos recuperated his losses when academic reports out of Stanford University indicated that Trump could do little to meaningfully regulate Amazon in the near-to-long term future.[55]
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