After Jeff Bezos established a huge business empire that conquered the earth in many ways, he set his sights on new areas of space.
Only two weeks after he resigned as CEO of Amazon, he took a reusable rocket made by his company Blue Origin into space, and Amazon has grown from a garage startup to one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Bezos, 57, is still the executive chairman of the technology and e-commerce giant he founded 27 years ago. But he is clearly looking for greater ambitions.
Bezos has more than 200 billion US dollars of wealth, even after his divorce agreement, has been at or close to the top of the richest people in the world.
He owns about 10% of Amazon. This behemoth has operations in dozens of countries and has about 1.3 million employees.
But Bezos often mentions his humble background: a teenage mother born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, adopted by his Cuban immigrant stepfather at the age of four.
Bezos was in its infancy in the IT industry and was attracted to computer science while studying engineering at Princeton University.
After graduation, he applied his skills to Wall Street jobs. By 1990, he had been promoted to senior vice president of investment company DE Shaw.
But about four years later, he left his high-paying position and opened an online bookstore called Amazon.com with the funding of his parents, which surprised his colleagues.
In his parting letter to employees, Bezos said that the company succeeded because he followed his mantra: “Keep inventing, and when this idea seems crazy at first, don’t despair.”
In public appearances, Bezos often recalled the early days of Amazon, when he packed his orders and drove the boxes to the post office.
Today, Amazon’s market value exceeds $1.8 trillion. It announced that the annual revenue of e-commerce, cloud computing, groceries, artificial intelligence, streaming media and other businesses in 2020 will be US$386 billion.
Darrell West, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution’s Technology Innovation Center, said: “Bezos has always been a transformative leader…in book sales, retail markets, cloud computing, and home delivery.”
“He is a pioneer, he introduced many conveniences that people take for granted, such as going to an online store, ordering things, and then delivering them to your home the next day. The entire e-commerce field owes many of its innovations to this person. “
Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said that Bezos “has an instinct for the right things” when looking for the next market.
Kay said that Bezos cleverly transitioned from books to other products to the online market, and successfully built a cloud infrastructure for the company to become a lucrative Amazon web service.
Kay said that Amazon gave up profits in the early stages and “reinvested everything in expansion” to surpass its competitors.
“If you look at the trajectory now, it’s all logical,” Kay added. “You can say that Bezos is one of the best business architects of his time.”
Bezos has been fascinated by space since he watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969 as a child and believes that space is important to the future of the earth.
He talked about the possibility of humans living in space colonies, drawing inspiration from science fiction writers and scientists.
“If we are to continue to have a prosperous civilization, we humans must go to space,” Bezos said in a CBS News interview in 2019.
“We, as a population, a species, have become very large, and the planet is relatively small. We have seen this in terms of climate change, pollution and heavy industry. We are destroying this planet… We must protect This planet.”
Bezos is getting rid of daily Amazon management and spending more time on projects including Blue Origin.
He owns The Washington Post and has invested time and money in addressing climate change.
Although Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage and other benefits, critics say its relentless focus on efficiency and worker monitoring has treated employees as machines.
The Teamsters union recently launched a campaign to organize Amazon employees, claiming that its employees “face inhumane, unsafe and low-paying jobs, with high turnover and no voice in their work.”
Earlier this year, Bezos seemed to have responded to workers’ concerns. In a fierce battle for union voting in Alabama, he called for a “better vision” for employees, but ultimately failed.
In his last letter as CEO, he set a new goal for the company, which is to become “the best employer on earth and the safest place to work on earth.”
