27 years after founding Amazon, Jeff Bezos is stepping down from the management team. The 57-year-old would like to devote himself to his numerous other projects and fulfill his greatest childhood dream: a journey into space.
He is the founder of the online giant Amazon and the richest person in the world – but he wants more. On Monday, Jeff Bezos resigns from the executive board after almost three decades. The previous head of Amazon’s cloud division, Andy Jassy, is to be his successor. Bezos, on the other hand, is preparing for a new mission: On July 20, Bezos wants to fly into space and thereby fulfill a lifelong dream.
Jeff Bezos fulfills a childhood dream
The multi-billionaire will then be on board for the first manned flight of his space company Blue Origin. A rocket will bring a futuristic capsule with Bezos, his brother Mark and other passengers to an altitude of around 100 kilometers, where four minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the earth await.
“I’ve always dreamed of going into space since I was five years old,” enthused Bezos in early June. “This is an adventure.”
Bezos, birth name Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, was apparently keen on adventure and experimentation from an early age. As a toddler he is said to have tried to take his bed apart. He later devoted himself to computer science and engineering and worked after graduating from elite Princeton University on Wall Street.
From bookseller to world market leader
The beginnings of Amazon are now legend: in his garage in Seattle, the then 30-year-old Bezos founded an online bookstore called amazon.com in 1994. To the astonishment of those around him, he left his well-paid job at the investment company DE Shaw behind; his parents loaned him the necessary start-up capital.
27 years later, Amazon not only dominates global online retail. The group also operates a streaming service for films, series and music, offers companies with its cloud division AWS IT services and works in the areas of robotics and artificial intelligence.
Bezos’ successor as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) will now be Andy Jassy, who is currently running AWS. As head of the Amazon board of directors, Bezos will continue to have a decisive influence on the future of the group. He will “remain involved in important Amazon initiatives,” said Bezos in February when he announced the succession plan.
Numerous projects are waiting for Bezos
The move allows Bezos to devote more time to his other projects: In addition to Blue Origin, the bald billionaire owns the renowned newspaper “Washington Post”, and he has also set up two charitable foundations. The Bezos Day One Fund supports homeless families and finances preschools in poorer residential areas, while the Bezos Earth Fund is dedicated to combating climate change. Bezos donated ten billion dollars to his Earth Fund alone last year.
He can afford it without any problems. Thanks to his Amazon shares, Bezos is the richest person in the world. The financial magazine “Forbes” estimates his fortune at around 198 billion dollars. And that despite the expensive divorce from his wife MacKenzie in 2019 after 25 years of marriage – Bezos left her a quarter of the joint Amazon shares.
Amazon is always criticized
The divorce made headlines not only because of the huge sums involved, but also because Bezos made an attempt at extortion by the magazine “National Inquirer” public, which had obtained intimate photos of him and a lover.
The Amazon group has made headlines again and again. There are regular criticisms of the working conditions of warehouse workers and suppliers as well as of the company’s resistance to the formation of trade unions. There is also growing criticism of the market power of the group, which is expanding with sometimes brutal methods, and which has called on competition authorities in the USA and Germany, among others.
“Keep inventing and don’t despair”
But for many, Bezos is a visionary and entrepreneurial role model. He recently gave his employees the following advice: “Keep inventing and don’t despair if the idea seems crazy at first.”
The British billionaire Richard Branson wants Bezos to anticipate the race into space. He wants to fly into space with a spaceship belonging to his company Virgin Galactic – nine days before the Amazon founder.
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