Jeff Bezos' journey from small suburban garage in US to edge of space; read highlights

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos launched into space on a maiden flight Tuesday aboard the world’s first fully automated New Shepard rocket with no pilots, just 9 days after his billionaire astronaut rival Sir Richard Branson marked his commercial space journey. Bezos and 3 three crewmates took off from the desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute trip to the edge of space to the Karman Line in his first crewed mission.

The world’s richest man started his journey from a humble e-commerce startup in a garage in suburban Seattle and climbed his way as an entrepreneur to realize his dream of space tourism that he said he had cultivated at the age of 5 years.

From a suburban garage to space

January 12, 1964: The American business magnate Jeff Bezos [Jeffrey Preston Bezos] was born on January 12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to parents Jacklyn Gise and Ted Jorgensen and was later adopted by immigrant engineer father Miguel Bezos and raised in Houston and later Miami.

1986: Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science after changing his major from physics. “I would be an extremely happy software programmer somewhere,” he said at a fireside chat in India.

1990: Joined the Wall Street-based investment banking firm DE Shaw & Co, and was on his way to become the company’s youngest Senior Vice President (VP). The tech mogul, Bezos spent his late 20s job-hopping like many millennials and wasn't born with the Midas touch, as colleagues described. The future billionaire had embraced closely his dream of running his own company one day, according to a 1999 Wired profile on the billionaire.

Jeff Bezos also had to ditch several positions at established companies like Intel, Bell Labs, and Anderson Consulting.

1993: In this year, the entrepreneur-to-be married his now ex-wife MacKenzie Tuttle, whom he worked for at DE Shaw. As per several reports at the time, a strange “fear of regret” towards the later part of life is what pushed him over the edge. He called this fear at the interviews “quiet moments of reflection.”

“I don't want to be 80 years old and be thinking back over my life and cataloging a bunch of major regrets," he said in an interview with his brother Mark at the Summit LA conference.

1994: Bezos, who now calls himself a “garage inventor”,  quit his job at DE Shaw, packed up, and moved to Seattle to open a virtual bookstore out of a garage.  Bezos’ small garage, transformed into an online bookstore, operated with just five employees. 

Blue Origin founder browsed at least 20 retail markets to gain inspiration and learn the nitty-gritty of the online business model. Bezos suggests all the aspiring entrepreneurs and business start-ups and employees ask themselves one question: "What does your heart say?” The tech mogul stated that he left Wall Street in 1994 and “never looked back,” adding that quitting a good-paying job with comfort life is never easy. 

1995: World’s richest man formally launches amazon.com, and sells books, quickly begins to expand and diversify. His e-commerce giant Amazon’s revenues, despite pandemic, grew 38 per cent to $386 billion in 2020. He stated that he will donate $100 million to ‘Feed America’, a nonprofit organization that operates food banks for underprivileged famished people. 

2000: Bezos founded his aerospace company Blue Origin. “We're committed to building a road to space so our children can build the future,” the firm states on the website. Blue Origin was founded with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth.

2006: Amazon boss establishes a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) from the internal infrastructure that amazon.com. AWS offers many tools and solutions for enterprises and software developers. He also founded Amazon Unbox, an original video programming service later renamed Amazon Prime Video.

2007: Amazon released the Kindle, its first e-reader on November 19 for $399, a portable digital reader which sold out in just about 5.5 hours and remained out of stock for five months until late April 2008.

2012: Blue Origin begins flight tests in New Shepard

2021: Blue Origin launches its first crewed mission on New Shepard rocket on July 20 to fly billionaire founder Jeff Bezos and three other passengers to suborbital space.