Jeff Bezos, Amazon to the "Washington Post" - 20minutes.fr

current CEO of online shopping website Amazon, recently owner Washington Post is an atypical pattern. Founder of the Internet merchant father is in his garage Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen raised by his adoptive father from the age of 4 years, Amazon has created the group in the early 1990s. An idea he had had across the U.S. by car from New York to Seattle.

Fascinated by science and the Internet

science and computer studies in Florida, then at the prestigious Princeton University, this passionate reading books and has worked in several financial firms on Wall Street, before deciding to start his own business.

Fascinated by the Internet and impressed by the strong growth of online commerce, he launched Amazon in Seattle, northwest of the United States in 1994. The first website opened in July 2005. Jeff Bezos then founded his empire on the book. The site is rapidly diversifying and now sells everything from cultural products to food, to clothes or furniture. The company is now the largest online auction site in the world with a turnover of $ 48 billion in 2011.

An estimated $ 25 billion heritage

With his band, the businessman of 49 years up to 19th among the world’s biggest fortunes, according to the latest ranking of Forbes magazine . His assets are estimated at over 25 billion dollars.

Jeff Bezos, married with four children, had been designated “Person of the Year” by the weekly Time in 1999. It has long been his place in the pantheon of the Internet with Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google .

Looking to the stars

Amazon’s boss is also a citizen committed to the defense of civil liberties. In July 2012, he and his wife signed a check for $ 2.5 million to support a referendum in favor of gay marriage in the state of Washington.

addition to daily activities in the Amazon seat, passionate science fiction also look to the stars. In 2000 he founded Blue Origin, a company that aims to send tourists into space, and already has facilities in Texas. Jeff Bezos dream for any young person develop hotels and attractions in orbit around the Earth parks.

First steps in the media

Jeff Bezos is now investing in the press, with the acquisition for $ 250 million, Washington Post , the seventh day of the United States. The American love and learned to diversify. But what are his motives? The prestige of owning a flagship of the American press? A journalist Guardian his analysis in the British newspaper on Tuesday. According to her, there is no financial incentive, the press no longer what it was “. Newspapers have regained their former status as toys of the rich, rather than profit centers induced by the market” Notice shared by columnist New York Times , in an article entitled: “Newspapers are the new trophies billionaires”

.

Anaëlle Grondin