Daily Mail

The dastardly Mr Deedesis Big shot of the weel JEFF BEZOS, 53

- FOUNDER, AMAZON

The Jeff Bezos laugh is a naughty cackle, one of those throaty, high-pitched squawks you can’t suppress when you see someone fall flat on their face while chasing for a bus.

It materialis­es regularly during interviews, often unprompted, and is so famous there are You Tube videos devoted to it.

With his neck craned back in ecstasy, domed head as bald as a badger, the Amazon founder looks almost maniacal. Toss a bleached white moggy on to his lap and he’d make a passable Blofeld in the next 007 outing.

The Bond villain analogy is currently apposite. With a fortune estimated at £62.5bn, putting him just behind Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the world rich list, Bezos, 53, has been gobbling up blue-chip firms like Karl Stromberg’s giant super tanker swallowed submarines in The Spy Who Loved Me.

After stunning the media industry four years ago when he bought The Washington Post for £200m, he caused similar ripples last week by bidding £10bn for US supermarke­t chain Whole Foods.

SMALLbusin­ess owners certainly like to cast him as a villain. To them, Bezos is the Antichrist whose relentless under-cutting has destroyed high Street shops.

To his supporters, he is the man who has revolution­ised shopping, bringing previously unattainab­le goods to all corners of the globe.

Whatever your view on this peculiar, though innately curious man, his success story remains nothing short of astonishin­g.

Born Jeffrey Jorgensen, his mother changed his name to Bezos after remarrying a Cuban when Jeff was four. his real father, a former circus unicyclist, learned of his son’s success only a few years ago after being approached by Bezos’s biographer. They’ve never spoken. Much of Bezos’s upbringing was spent on his grandfathe­r’s ranch in Texas, where the self-reliant way of life inspired the young boy’s knack for innovation.

After graduating from Princeton, a successful stint on Wall Street followed, rising to vice-president of investment bank De Shaw.

In 1994 he took the risky decision to jack in a steady job and move to Seattle to cash-in on the explosion of the internet – or ‘informatio­n super highway’ as it was then more popularly known.

he and wife MacKenzie, with whom he has four children, rented a three-bedroom house in the suburbs which fulfilled the crucial requiremen­t of having a garage.

Like Silicon Valley legends Steve Jobs, Bill hewlett and Dave Packard before him, Bezos wanted to be able to say that was where the company started.

Armed with $1m he’d raised from family and friends, his plan was to sell a vast array of books at a discount, with a business solely concentrat­ed on customers rather than competitor­s.

Its initial name Cadabra was scrapped (Bezos’s lawyer misheard it as Cadaver) and switched to Amazon, which he thought sounded exotic. Within two months of Amazon’s launch in July 1995, it was selling in 45 countries.

When the dotcom bubble burst at the turn of the century, tech writers predicted Bezos’s demise.

ONeheadlin­e read ‘Amazon.bomb’ after £2bn was wiped off its value. But it turned its first profit in 2001. Fast forward to 2017, and it employs more than 340,000 and has a market value of £367bn.

Bezos’s commitment to customer service is legendary. Colleagues say it drives him far more than wealth or influence. When an elderly lady complained she had difficulty opening its brown packaging, Bezos ordered a redesign. After acquiring the Post, he is said to have personally answered every customer who emailed with concerns.

The same colleagues say such dedication also makes him tricky to work with. he can be obsessive, berating anyone failing to meet his exacting standards. Donald Trump’s not a fan. The president has accused Amazon of ‘getting away with murder’ tax-wise (an accusation it also faces over here) and there have been reports that work conditions in its depots leave something to be desired.

having conquered retail, Bezos’s eyes are now fixed upon another frontier. The self- confessed Star Trek nut plans to sell $1bn worth of Amazon stock a year to invest in Blue Origin, a rocket company he hopes will launch customers into space sometime next year.

For Jeff Bezos, it seems, the world is simply not enough.

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom