Bezos tops in battle of show and tell
He built one of the world’s most valuable firms from scratch, becoming the richest person on the planet. Now Jeff Bezos is intent on showing he will not be bullied in a battle of wills with the politically connected owner of a newspaper tabloid.
The 55-year-old Bezos founded Amazon in his garage in 1994 and went on to grow it into a colossus that dominates online retail, with operations in music and TV, groceries, cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and more.
His other businesses include The Washington Post newspaper and the private space company Blue Origin.
Bezos and his $133bn fortune were thrust into the spotlight with his announcement in January that he and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, are divorcing.
When the National Enquirer, controlled by President Donald Trump’s ally David Pecker, threatened to release lurid, intimate pictures of Bezos and his mistress, he fought back by releasing the details of his exchanges publicly.
NOT EVERYONE CAN STAND UP TO BULLIES, THUGS AND EXTORTIONISTS, BUT IF YOU CAN, YOU SHOULD
“If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” Bezos wrote on Medium.
The bombshell from Bezos brought a tidal wave of reaction.
“Not everyone can stand up to bullies, thugs and extortionists, but if you can, you should,” said rival tech pioneer Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.
Until recently, Bezos had been seen as a bookish but determined entrepreneur, running his businesses with ruthless determination but avoiding the limelight — steering clear of confronting Trump after a series of attacks by the president.
Bezos’s penchant for experimenting dates to a young age, with one story recounting how he tried to dismantle his own crib as a toddler.
His mother was a teenager when she gave birth to Bezos in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12 1964. Her family were settlers in Texas, where Bezos spent many a summer working at a ranch owned by a grandfather retired from a job as a regional director at the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Bezos was enchanted by computer science when the IT industry was in its infancy and studied engineering at Princeton University. After graduating, he put his skills to work on Wall Street, where by 1990 he had risen to senior vice-president at investment firm DE Shaw.
He surprised all by leaving his high-paid post about four years later to open online bookseller Amazon.com, backed by money from his parents.