Jeff Bezos

1964–present

Jeff Bezos News: Amazon Founder Marries Lauren Sanchez in Extravagant Venice Wedding

Billionaire Jeff Bezos is now married to former television host Lauren Sanchez after a three-day wedding extravaganza in Venice, Italy, last month. Around 200 people were expected to attend the festivities, including celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Usher, Bill Gates, and First Lady Ivanka Trump.

The 61-year-old Amazon founder reportedly wed 55-year-old Sanchez on June 27 in a black-tie ceremony on the private island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The main wedding reception took place the following day at the Arsenale, a complex of former shipyards surrounded by walls on the outskirts of Venice. The reception venue was apparently changed at the last minute amid Venetians’ “No Space for Bezos” protests across the city. According to Luca Zaia, the president of the Veneto region, the wedding was expected to cost around $50 million.

Bezos and Sanchez first went public with their relationship in January 2019 following the entrepreneur’s divorce from Mackenzie Scott. Sanchez also left her former husband Patrick Whitesell around that time. A month later, a National Enquirer exposé alleged the pair had been involved in an extramarital affair for eight months prior to their respective divorces. In response, Bezos accused the tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., of trying to blackmail him.

The couple made their first public appearance together at Wimbledon in July 2019 and eventually got engaged in May 2023.

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and executive chair of Amazon, owner of The Washington Post, and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that has become a retail juggernaut. He started Blue Origin in 2000, then in 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods, and the company purchased MGM Studios in 2022. Bezos’ successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world; his estimated net worth is at least $233 billion as of June 2025.

FULL NAME: Jeffrey Preston Bezos
BORN: January 12, 1964
BIRTHPLACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico
SPOUSES: MacKenzie Scott (1993–2019) and Lauren Sanchez (2025–present)
CHILDREN: 3 sons and 1 daughter
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Jeff Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His parents, Jacklyn “Jackie” Jorgensen and the late Ted Jorgensen, were both teenagers when Jeff was born, and their marriage lasted about two years. Ted sporadically saw his son after that but soon lost touch entirely (Ted didn’t even know Jeff had become a billionaire until 2012 when journalist Brad Stone reached out to the bike shop owner while writing his book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon).

When Jeff was 4 years old, his mother remarried Miguel “Mike” Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who became an engineer at Exxon. Jackie and Jeff took Bezos as their new last name, and Mike adopted the young boy. “The reality, as far as I’m concerned, is that my dad [Mike] is my natural father,” Jeff later told Wired. “The only time I ever think about it, genuinely, is when a doctor asks me to fill out a form.”

The Bezos family lived in Houston for a time to accommodate Mike’s job. Jackie and Mike went on to have a daughter and another son together, making Jeff the oldest of their three children. Although Mike was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, it’s unknown if Jeff and his siblings share their father’s religious affiliation.

Education

Jeff showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child. He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and started his first business. Jeff opened an educational summer camp called the Dream Institute for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders.

In 1982, the bright, ambitious Jeff graduated as valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School. He then attended Princeton University, where he studied computer science and electrical engineering. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986.

Finance Career

After graduating from Princeton, Jeff worked at several companies on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the relatively new hedge fund D.E. Shaw. In 1990, when he was 26, Jeff became D.E. Shaw’s youngest vice president.

His career in finance was extremely lucrative, yet Jeff chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle, and targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Bezos was 31 when he opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American river, to the public on July 16, 1995. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees had been developing software with Bezos in his garage, and the pioneering internet entrepreneur enlisted 300 friends to beta test his site. Eventually, the startup expanded its operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstations.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his team had envisioned.

Amazon became a publicly traded company on May 15, 1997, with an IPO price of $18 per share. Many market analysts questioned whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, Amazon not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors to become an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998 and later clothes, electronics, toys, and more through major retail partnerships. Today, the company sells practically all types of goods from third-party retailers and a swath of products under its Amazon Basics line.

Although many dot.coms of the early ’90s went bust, Amazon has flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to $638 billion in 2024. According to consumer research, almost half of all U.S. households in 2016—54 million—were Prime members and spent, on average, $1,100 per year with Amazon. Bezos reported in his 2018 annual shareholder letter that the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for Amazon Prime. That number doubled by the 2021 shareholder letter from Andy Jassy, who took over as CEO when Bezos stepped down.

Ultimately, Amazon has grown to become one of the most valuable public companies in the world. It was the second business to reach the record worth of $1 trillion in September 2018, just a few weeks after Apple. In November 2022, Amazon logged a major milestone as the world’s first public company to lose its $1 trillion market value; however, the e-commerce business was still valued at $879 billion after the drop. Its value has rebounded significantly, and as of July 2025, Amazon is valued above $2.4 trillion.

Amazon’s services and products include:

Company Expansion and Controversies

As Amazon has looked to open more fulfillment centers across the country to reduce costs and delivery times, cities and municipalities that anticipate jobs and tax windfalls have battled to bring the e-commerce behemoth to their region. By some estimates, Amazon has received $4.2 billion in government subsidies, through property tax abatements, corporate income tax credits, and sales tax exemptions for construction materials.

Amazon opened nearly 300 new facilities in 2020, as much as the previous four years combined. Although the expansion allowed the company to reduce delivery times and their associated energy costs, critics have said Amazon’s facilities add to traffic congestion, reduce road safety, and create pollution from van and truck exhaust.

Amazon has partnered with electric car company Rivian to bring thousands of custom electric delivery vehicles to more than 100 cities by the end of 2023 and 100,000 by 2030. Decarbonizing Amazon’s delivery network and bringing sustainability and energy efficiency to their fulfillment centers are key goals for the company. In its Climate Pledge, Amazon has committed to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Amazon opened its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, in June 2023.

The company opened a major part of its East Coast headquarters, Amazon HQ2, in northern Virginia in June 2023. Amazon estimated that 25,000 new jobs would be created on its new campus.

Worker Conditions, Unionization, and Layoffs

At the end of 2018, Amazon announced it was raising the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. The company has been criticized for its working conditions and grueling pace, with workers protesting during Prime Day in July 2019.

In 2021, the company settled claims with the Federal Trade Commission that Amazon stiffed its contract workers $61.7 million in tips they had earned from making deliveries. Drivers also filed a class action lawsuit against the company in 2022 alleging wage theft. The case hasn’t been resolved.

Employees at several Amazon warehouses across the country have mobilized efforts to unionize in order to improve working conditions and wages. As the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to work from home, Amazon delivery surged, and Amazon warehouse employees became essential workers. They endured long hours and arduous conditions, many contracting the virus themselves. This further bolstered unionization efforts. The company has said it supports its workers, however, Amazon has been accused of employing intimidation tactics, such as surveillance and reprisals, to quell labor unrest and bust unionization drives.

In a move to streamline its business and adjust to a difficult global economy, Amazon announced a wave of layoffs in 2023. Early in the year Amazon laid off 18,000 employees and another 9,000 in March. The following month, Amazon eliminated 100 positions within its Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video divisions. Layoffs continued in 2024, primarily among the Amazon Web Services ranks, and in June 2025, the company announced it expects its workforce will continue to shrink as generative AI continues to expand within its internal operations.

Stepping Down as Amazon CEO

In February 2021, Bezos announced he would step down as CEO of the company he launched 27 years earlier and transition to executive chairman of the e-commerce giant on July 5. Longtime Amazon employee Andy Jassy, who was chairman of Amazon Web Services, the company’s most profitable division, was named CEO. In an email to employees announcing the leadership change, Bezos shared his “need to focus on the Day One Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”

Both Forbes and Blooomberg rank Bezos as the third richest person in the world behind Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, though Bloomberg reports Bezos’ net worth is tied with that of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Estimates of the Amazon founder’s net worth vary, and his wealth is highly volatile given that much of it is tied up in stock.

As of July 15, 2025, Forbes reports Bezos has a net worth of $239.8 billion. Bloomberg’s estimate is higher at $246 billion. The Wall Street Journal pegged the entrepreneur’s net worth at $263.8 billion back in February 2025.

Bezos’ fortune took a considerable hit after his 2019 divorce from MacKenzie Scott. Although he kept 12 percent of their Amazon shares, worth more than $108 billion, at the time, Scott walked away with a 4 percent stake worth around $36 billion.

The entrepreneur has subsequently sold off more of his Amazon stock and now owns around 9 percent of the company. Across two weeks in late June and early July 2025 alone, he sold $1.5 billion worth of Amazon stock. He remains Amazon’s largest shareholder.

Through his investment firm Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in companies like Airbnb, Nextdoor, and the software firm Workday.

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company dedicated to space tourism. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly as it developed technologies to lower the cost of space travel for paying customers.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes. “We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen,” Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

On July 21, 2021—the 52^nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing—Bezos and a hand-picked group that included his brother blasted into space in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. Reaching an altitude of 66 miles, the flight lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds. Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson made his space flight nine days earlier as the two billionaires’ race for space tourism dominance waged on.

NASA announced in May 2023 that it had selected Blue Origin to handle the third crewed Artemis Moon landing, projected to launch in September 2029. Production of the company’s Blue Moon lander is already underway. The NASA award is worth $3.4 billion. Blue Origin lost out to SpaceX in 2021 when NASA awarded Elon Musk’s company $2.9 billion to build a variation of its giant Starship vehicle that would land astronauts on the moon.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company’s chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham.

“The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. “But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote:

“The values of The Post do not need changing... There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper’s technology staff (hundreds of those employees published an open letter to their boss asking for salary increases and better benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted several scoops, including revealing that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russians, leading to his resignation.

By 2016, the organization said it was profitable. The following year, the Post had an ad revenue of more than $100 million, with three straight years of double-digit revenue growth. Amazon soon bypassed The New York Times digital in unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019, according to ComScore.

After years of profitability, the Post ended 2020 in the red. With ad revenue declining and online subscriptions slowing, in January 2023 the paper laid off newsroom staff.

On January 30, 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase delivered a joint press release in which they announced plans to pool their resources to form a new healthcare company for their U.S. employees. According to the release, the company will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints” as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction for patients, with an initial focus on technology solutions.

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Bezos said. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

As one of the world’s wealthiest people, Bezos had been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of philanthropic efforts. But in recent years, he has made major philanthropic donations through two new initiatives.

In 2018, Bezos and then-wife MacKenzie Scott launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on “funding existing nonprofits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities.” The announcement came a year after Bezos had asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune. Bezos gave away $2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit.

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

Following his return from space, whose cost was widely criticized, Bezos announced that he was giving away two $100 million awards. The first Courage and Civility Awards were given in 2021 to Van Jones, the activist and TV personality, and Jose Andres, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen.

Bezos has given away $2.1 billion, which is 1.2 percent of his wealth.

Bezos met MacKenzie Scott (then MacKenzie Tuttle) when they both worked at D.E. Shaw: he as a senior vice president and she as an administrative assistant to pay the bills to fund her writing career. The couple dated for three months before getting engaged and married shortly thereafter in 1993. Bezos and Scott have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

Scott was an integral part of the founding and success of Amazon, helping create Amazon’s first business plan and serving as the company’s first accountant. Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband. A novelist by trade, training under Toni Morrison during her college years at Princeton University, Scott published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright, in 2005, and her second novel, Traps, in 2013.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Bezos and Scott divorced in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Bezos’ stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his stake at nearly $110 billion and Scott’s at more than $37 billion. Scott announced that she planned to give away at least half of her wealth to charity.

Right after Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie in January 2019, The National Enquirer published an 11-page exposé of the business mogul’s extramarital affair with television host Lauren Sanchez. Bezos subsequently launched an investigation into the motives of The National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. The following month, in a lengthy post on Medium, Bezos accused AMI of threatening to publish explicit photos unless he backed off the investigation.

“Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” Bezos wrote. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

In that same post, Bezos suggested that there was possibly a link between AMI’s actions and the Saudi Arabian government. Later, a forensic analysis of Bezos’ phone revealed that it was hacked after he received a video via WhatsApp from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Sanchez divorced her husband in April 2019. She and Bezos made their first public appearance as a couple that July at Wimbledon. In late May 2023, Page Six first reported that Bezos and Sanchez are engaged. The following year, the couple attended the White House state dinner together, and in April 2025, Sanchez was part of the all-female screw on the Blue Origin spaceflight. Bezos and Sanchez got married in Venice, Italy in June 2025 in a star-studded wedding attended by 200 guests. The celebration included three days of festivities, including a pre-wedding reception, the ceremony, and a post-wedding reception.

The Seattle residence that has been Bezos’ primary home for several decades includes two houses, with a combined size of over 28,000 square feet, and sits on about 5.3 acres, overlooking Lake Washington. This lakefront home, in the same neighborhood as fellow tech giant Bill Gates, is just one of the many properties in the Amazon founder’s portfolio. He also owns properties in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Maui, Hawaii; several sprawling estates in California; a Texas ranch, and others. The total value of Bezos’ real estate holdings is more than $578 million.

A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. He is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb.

Bezos has taken an interest in helicopters, something he previously feared after surviving a helicopter crash in Mexico in 2003 while searching for a place to launch the newly-formed Blue Origin’s rockets. He credits his finaceé, Lauren Sanchez, for his newfound interest; she is a licensed helicopter pilot and owner of an aerial filming company. Bezos is working toward his pilot’s license.

Bezos has another unusual hobby: scouring the ocean floor for discarded NASA space rockets from its Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s. Working with teams on submarines, and with assistance from NASA, Bezos is interested in identifying and restoring the recovered pieces.

The billionaire is also the owner of the world’s largest sailing yacht, Koru, from a Maori that means “new life,” unveiled in March 2023. The 417-foot vessel cost an estimated $500 million to build and boasts a mermaid figurehead on the prow that resembles Sanchez. The boat created controversy in the Dutch city of Rotterdam where it was built, when the city announced that it would dismantle a bridge so that the Koru’s 230-foot-tall main mast could pass through. Bowing to pressure from its citizens, the ship was towed to another location where its masts were attached and the bridge remained intact.

• It’s perfectly healthy—encouraged, even—to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea to.
• On the future of The Washington Post: We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.
• Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.
• In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
  

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