Jeff Bezos

📍Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

“Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in January 1964. His mother, Jacklyn, was seventeen, and her marriage to his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, soon ended. When Jeff was four, his mother married Miguel Bezos, who had come to the United States alone from Cuba as a teenager, and Miguel adopted him and gave him his surname. From the age of four to sixteen, Jeff spent his summers on his maternal grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise's ranch near Cotulla, in south Texas, fixing windmills, mending fences and repairing machinery, an experience he has credited with teaching him resourcefulness. The family moved to Houston and later to Miami, where he graduated from high school as valedictorian. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton, and in 1994 founded Amazon.”

Sources: Stone, B. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013), Little, Brown; Bezos, J. Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (2020), Harvard Business Review Press