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کتاب: فروشگاه همه چیز / فصل 6

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PART II

Literary Influences CHAPTER 5

Rocket Boy

Jeff Bezos did more than just refute Ravi Suria and other skeptics during the dot-com bust. He soundly defeated them, and then he surreptitiously encoded his victory for posterity in a press release. Similarly, he did more than just outmaneuver Barnes & Noble in the marketplace—he enjoyed telling the story of how he’d held his first meetings in its coffee shops.

When Bezos’s longtime friends and colleagues try to explain his fierce competitive streak and uncommon need to best his adversaries, they often veer into the past—back almost fifty years—to the circumstances of his early childhood. Bezos grew up in a tight-knit family, with two deeply involved and caring parents, Jackie and Mike, and two close younger siblings, Christina and Mark. Seemingly, there was nothing unusual about it.

Yet for a brief period early in his life, before this ordinary childhood, Bezos lived alone with his mother and grandparents. And before that, he lived with his mother and his biological father, a man named Ted Jorgensen. Bezos himself told Wired magazine that he remembered when Jackie and Mike, who is technically his adoptive father, explained this situation to him when he was ten. He learned Mike wasn’t his biological father around the same time he learned that he needed glasses. “That made me cry,” he said.1 Years later, as a college student, he confronted his mother and asked her a series of pointed questions about his birth. They both declined to discuss the details of that conversation but afterward Bezos hugged her and said, “You did a great job, Mom.”2

Bezos says that the only time he thinks about Ted Jorgensen is when he’s filling out a medical form that asks for his family history. He told Wired in 1999 that he had never met the man. Strictly speaking, that is not true; Bezos last saw him when he was three years old.

It is of course unknowable whether the unusual circumstances of his birth helped to create that fecund entrepreneurial mix of intelligence, ambition, and a relentless need to prove himself. Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed. In Bezos’s case, what is undeniably true is that from his earliest years, his parents and teachers recognized that this child was different—unnaturally gifted, but also unusually driven. His childhood was a launching pad, of sorts, that sent Bezos rocketing toward a life as an entrepreneur. It also instilled in him an abiding interest in the exploration and discovery of space, a fascination that perhaps one day may actually take him there.

Theodore John Jorgensen was a circus performer and in the 1960s was one of Albuquerque’s best unicyclists. The archives of local newspapers contain a colorful record of his youthful proficiency. An Albuquerque Journal photograph taken in 1961, when he was sixteen, shows him standing on the pedals of his unicycle facing backward, one hand on the seat, the other splayed theatrically to the side, his expression tense with concentration. The caption says he was awarded “most versatile rider” in the local unicycle club.

That year, Jorgensen and half a dozen other riders traveled widely playing unicycle polo in a team managed by Lloyd Smith, the owner of a local bike shop. Jorgensen’s team was victorious in places like Newport Beach, California, and Boulder, Colorado. The newspaper has an account of the Boulder event. Four hundred people turned out in freezing weather to a shopping-center parking lot to watch the teams swivel around in four inches of snow wielding thirty-six-inch-long plastic mallets in pursuit of a small rubber ball, six inches in diameter. Jorgensen’s team swept the contest, a doubleheader, three to two and six to five.3

In 1963, Jorgensen’s troupe resurfaced in newspapers as the Unicycle Wranglers, touring county fairs, sporting events, and circuses. They square-danced, did the jitterbug and the twist, skipped rope, and performed tricks like riding on a high wire. The group practiced constantly, rehearsing three times a week at Lloyd Smith’s shop and taking dance classes two times a week. “It’s like balancing on greased lightning and dancing all at the same time,” one member told the Albuquerque Tribune.4 When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, the Wranglers performed under the big top, and in the spring of 1965 they performed in eight local shows of the Rude Brothers Circus. They also went to Hollywood to try out (unsuccessfully, as it happened) for the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ted Jorgensen was born in Chicago to a family of Baptists. His father moved the family to Albuquerque when Jorgensen and his younger brother, Gordon, were in elementary school. Ted’s father took a job as a purchase agent at Sandia, then the largest nuclear-weapons installation in the country, handling the procurement of supplies at the base. Jorgensen’s paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was one of the last surviving veterans of the Spanish American War.

In high school Jorgensen started dating Jacklyn Gise, a girl two years his junior whose father also worked at Sandia. Their dads knew each other. Her father, Lawrence Preston Gise, known to friends as Preston and to his family as Pop, ran the local office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency that managed the nuclear-weapons program after Truman took it from the military following World War II.

Jorgensen had just turned eighteen and was finishing his senior year in high school when Gise became pregnant. She was sixteen and a sophomore. They were in love and decided to get married. Her parents gave them money to fly to Juárez, Mexico, for a ceremony. A few months later, on July 19, 1963, they married again at the Gises’ house. Because Gise was underage, both her mother and Jorgensen’s signed the application for a marriage license. The baby was born on January 12, 1964. They named him Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.

The new parents rented an apartment in the city’s Southeast Heights neighborhood and Jackie finished high school. During the day, her mother, Mattie, took care of the baby. The situation was difficult. Jorgensen was perpetually broke, and they had only one car, his cream-colored ’55 Chevy. Belonging to a unicycle troupe didn’t pay much. The Wranglers divided their fees among all members, with Lloyd Smith taking a generous cut off the top. Eventually Jorgensen got a $1.25-an-hour job at the Globe Department Store, which was part of Walgreen’s short-lived foray into the promising discount-retail market being pioneered at the time by Kmart and Walmart. Occasionally Jackie brought the baby to the store to visit.

The parents were young and immature and their marriage was probably doomed from the start. But Jorgensen also had a habit of drinking too much and carousing late at night with friends. He was an inattentive dad and husband. Preston Gise tried to help him; he paid his son-in-law’s tuition at the University of New Mexico, but Jorgensen dropped out after a few semesters. Gise then tried to get Jorgensen a job with the New Mexico State Police, but Jorgensen didn’t follow through on the opportunity.

Eventually, Jackie took the child and moved back in with her parents on Sandia Base. In June 1965, when the baby was seventeen months old, she filed for divorce. The court ordered Jorgensen to pay forty dollars a month in child support. Court records indicate that his income at the time was a hundred and eighty dollars a month. Over the next few years, Jorgensen visited his son occasionally but missed many of those support payments. He was undependable, and he had no money.

Then Jackie started dating someone. On several occasions when Jorgensen was visiting his son, the other man was there, and they avoided each other. But Jorgensen asked around and heard he was a good guy.

In 1968, Jackie called Ted Jorgensen on the phone and told him she was getting remarried and moving to Houston. He could stop paying child support, but she wanted to give Jeffrey her new husband’s surname and let him adopt the boy. She asked Jorgensen not to interfere in their lives. Around the same time, Jackie’s father cornered Jorgensen and elicited from him a promise that he would stay away. But Ted’s permission was needed for the adoption, and after thinking it over and reasoning that the boy was likely to have a better life as the son of Jackie and her new husband, Jorgensen gave it. After a few years, he lost track of the family, and then he forgot their last name. For decades he wouldn’t know what had become of his child, and his own bad choices haunted him.

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 blew apart the comfortable world of Miguel Angel Bezos Perez. Jeff Bezos’s future adoptive father had been attending the elite Jesuit private school Colegio de Dolores in Santiago de Cuba, on the south coast of the island, when the Batista government fell. Castro (himself a graduate of Dolores) replaced the schools with socialist youth camps and shut down private companies, including a lumberyard owned by Miguel Bezos’s father and uncle where Miguel worked most mornings. Miguel and his friends spent their days on the street, floating around and “doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, like writing anti-Castro slogans,” he says. When his parents heard about his antics, they worried he could get in trouble and, like many other Cuban families with teenage children, started making preparations to send him to the United States.

They waited a year before they got his passport under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Miguel’s mother fretted about his moving to the frigid climate of el norte, so she and his sister knitted him a sweater from old rags. Miguel wore it to the airport. (The sweater is now framed and hanging on the wall of his home in Aspen.) His mother had to drop him off at the curb and then park in a nearby lot to watch the plane take off. But the family figured this was temporary and would last only until the political situation stabilized and everything reverted to normal.

Miguel Bezos arrived in Miami in 1962, sixteen years old and alone. He knew only one word in English: hamburger. He was one of the oldest members of Operation Pedro Pan, a rescue program run by the Catholic Church and heavily funded by the U.S. government, that removed thousands of teenagers from Castro’s grip in the early 1960s. The Catholic Welfare Bureau brought Bezos to a South Florida camp, called Matecumbe, where he joined four hundred other exiled children. By a stroke of good fortune, the next day his cousin Angel arrived at the same facility. “Immediately the two of us were joined at the hip,” Miguel says. A few weeks later, they were summoned to the camp’s office and given suitcases and heavy jackets—real ones. They were being moved to a group home in Wilmington, Delaware. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Boy, we’re in trouble,’ ” Miguel recalls.

Miguel and his cousin joined about two dozen other Pedro Pans in a facility called Casa de Sales under the care of Father James Byrnes, a young priest who spoke fluent Spanish and enjoyed the occasional vodka tonic. They would later learn he was fresh from the seminary, but to his youthful charges, Byrnes was a towering figure of authority. He taught them English, forced them to focus on their studies, and gave them each fifty cents a week after their chores were done so they could attend a Saturday-night dance. “What he did for us we can never repay,” says Carlos Rubio Albet, Miguel and Angel Bezos’s roommate at the facility. “He took a houseful of exiled teenage boys who didn’t speak English and turned it into a real family. That first Christmas I was there, in ’62, he made sure everyone had something under that tree.” After the thirteen tension-filled days of the Cuban missile crisis in October of that year, the residents of La Casa, as they called it, knew they weren’t going home any time soon.

While the atmosphere at the Casa de Sales was strict, the teenagers enjoyed themselves, and when they later gathered for reunions with Father Byrnes, they remembered their days there as among the happiest of their lives. The young Miguel Bezos had a particular affinity for one practical joke. When someone new arrived at the orphanage, he would pretend to be a deaf-mute, gesturing and grunting for items at the dinner table. A few days into the routine, he would startle the joke’s target, usually by standing up and shouting as an attractive girl passed, “Man, that’s a good-looking woman!” His friends would all sing out, “It’s a miracle!” before everyone collapsed in stitches.

Miguel Bezos left the Casa de Sales after a year and enrolled as an undergraduate in the University of Albuquerque, a now-defunct Catholic college that offered full scholarships for Cuban refugees. To earn extra money, he got a job as a clerk on the overnight shift at the Bank of New Mexico—at the same time as the young, recently divorced Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen started work in the bank’s bookkeeping department. Their shifts overlapped by an hour. In his thick Cuban accent and rudimentary English, Bezos asked her out several times; he was repeatedly but politely rejected. Finally, she agreed. On their first date they saw the movie The Sound of Music.

Miguel Bezos went on to graduate from the University of New Mexico and married Jackie in April 1968 at the First Congregational Church in Albuquerque. The reception was held at the Coronado Club on Sandia Base. Miguel got a job as a petroleum engineer at Exxon and they moved to Houston, the first stop in a career that would take them to three continents. Four-year-old Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen became Jeffrey Preston Bezos and started calling Miguel Bezos Dad. A year later, they had a daughter, Christina, and then a year after that, another son, Mark.

Jeff and his siblings grew up observing their father’s tireless work ethic and his frequent expressions of love for America and its opportunities and freedoms. Miguel Bezos, who later began going by the name Mike, acknowledges that he may have also passed on a libertarian aversion to government intrusion into the private lives and enterprises of citizens. “Certainly it was something that permeated our home life,” he says, while noting that dinnertime conversations were apolitical and revolved around the kids. “I cannot stand any kind of totalitarian form of government, from the right or the left or anything in between, and maybe that had some impact.”

Certain moments in the early life of her oldest child took on significance when Jackie Bezos viewed them in retrospect. Like the time three-year-old Jeff disassembled his crib with a screwdriver because he insisted on sleeping in a bed. Or the time she took him to a spinning boat ride in the park and saw that while the other toddlers were waving to their moms, Jeff was looking at the mechanical workings of the cables and pulleys. Teachers at his Montessori preschool reported to his parents that the boy became so engrossed in whatever he was doing that they had to pick his chair up, with him still in it, and move it to the next activity. But Jeff was Jackie’s first child; she thought all children were like that. “The term gifted was new to the education vocabulary and certainly to me at age twenty-six,” Jackie Bezos says. “I knew he was precocious and determined and incredibly focused, and you follow that through to now and see that it hasn’t changed.”

At age eight, Bezos scored highly on a standardized test, and his parents enrolled him in the Vanguard program at River Oaks Elementary School, a half-hour drive from their home. Bezos was a standout pupil, and the school’s principal trotted him out to speak to visitors like Julie Ray, who was doing research for her book Turning On Bright Minds. A local company donated the excess capacity on its mainframe computer to the school, and the young Bezos led a group of friends in connecting to the mainframe via a Teletype machine that sat in the school hallway. They taught themselves how to program, then discovered a primitive Star Trek game on the mainframe and spent countless hours playing it.

At the time, Bezos’s parents worried their son might be turning into a bit of an egghead. To ensure he was well rounded and help him “make friends with his weaknesses,” as Jackie Bezos later put it, they enrolled him in various youth sports. Bezos was a pitcher in baseball, but his aim proved so unpredictable that his mother tied a mattress to the fence and asked him to practice on his own. He also reluctantly played football, barely clearing the league weight limit but getting named defensive captain by the team coach because he could memorize the plays and remembered where everyone on the field was supposed to stand. “I was dead set against playing football,” he said. “I had no interest in playing a game where people would tackle me to the ground.” Still, in sports, Bezos revealed a ferocious competitive streak, and when his football team, the Jets, lost the league championship, he broke down in tears.5

Playing sports didn’t diminish young Jeff Bezos’s passion for the nerdier pastimes. Star Trek was a fixture in the Bezos household in Houston, and they watched reruns in the afternoon after school. “We were all Trekkies. It got to the point where Jeff would quote the lines, he was so captivated,” says Jackie Bezos. The program reinforced a budding fascination with space exploration that had begun when he was five and watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on his family’s old black-and-white television. His grandfather, who two decades earlier had worked in the military’s research and development wing, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA), also stoked this obsession, telling stories of rockets, missiles, and the coming wonders of space travel.

In 1968, at age fifty-three, Pop Gise resigned from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission over a bureaucratic squabble with his bosses in Washington. He and Mattie retired to his wife’s family’s ranch in Cotulla, Texas. Between the ages of four and sixteen, Jeff Bezos spent every summer with his grandparents, and his grandfather enlisted his help in doing the gritty work of the ranch, which was a hundred miles from the nearest store or hospital.

Gise, who had been a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was in many ways Bezos’s mentor. He instilled in Bezos the values of self-reliance and resourcefulness, as well as a visceral distaste for inefficiency. “There was very little he couldn’t do himself,” Jackie Bezos says of her father. “He thought everything was something you could tackle in a garage.” Bezos and Pop Gise repaired windmills and castrated bulls; they attempted to grade dirt roads and built contraptions like an automatic gate opener and a crane to move the heavy parts of a broken-down D6 Caterpillar bulldozer.

Every so often, Pop Gise got carried away with this do-it-yourself impulse. One such occasion occurred when his faithful bird dog Spike injured the tip of his tail in a car door. The nearby veterinarians all specialized in cattle and other large animals, and Gise reasoned that he could perform the necessary amputation himself in his garage. “I never knew a dog’s tail could bleed so much,” he reported afterward.

But it wasn’t all amateur surgeries and physical labor; Pop Gise also inspired in his grandson a passion for intellectual pursuits. He brought him to the local Cotulla library, where over successive summers Bezos made his way through a sizable collection of science-fiction books donated by a local resident. He read seminal works by Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein and fantasized about interstellar travel, deciding that he wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. Pop Gise taught Bezos checkers and then soundly and repeatedly defeated him, despite Jackie’s pleading with him to let Jeff win a match. “He’ll beat me when he’s ready to,” her father said.6

Bezos’s grandparents taught him a lesson in compassion that he related decades later, in a 2010 commencement speech at Princeton. Every few years Pop and Mattie Gise hooked an Airstream trailer to their car and caravanned around the country with other Airstream owners, and they sometimes took Jeff with them. On one of these road trips, when Bezos was ten and passing time in the back seat of the car, he took some mortality statistics he had heard on an antismoking public service announcement and calculated that his grandmother’s smoking habit would take nine years off her life. When he poked his head into the front seat to matter-of-factly inform her of this, she burst into tears, and Pop Gise pulled over and stopped the car.

In fact, Mattie Gise fought cancer for years and would eventually succumb to it. Bezos described what happened next in his speech at Princeton.

He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

When Jeff was thirteen, Mike Bezos’s job with Exxon took the family to Pensacola, on the Florida Panhandle. Showing the same unwavering resolve that her son would employ later in life, Jackie Bezos prevailed on local school officials to let her son into the middle school’s gifted program despite the fact that the program had a strict one-year waiting period. The officials had been reluctant, so she forced them to examine the boy’s work, which changed their minds.7 “You want to account for Jeff’s success, look at Jackie,” says Bezos’s childhood friend Joshua Weinstein. “She’s the toughest lady you’ll ever meet and also the sweetest and most loyal.”

The former Jackie Gise was just thirty when her oldest child became a teenager, but she understood him well and nurtured his passions. Bezos had dreams of becoming an inventor like Thomas Edison, so his mother patiently shuttled him back and forth and back again to a local Radio Shack to buy parts for a succession of gadgets: homemade robots, hovercrafts, a solar-powered cooker, and devices to keep his siblings out of his room. “I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps,” Bezos said later. “I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have thirty pounds of nails drop on their head or something.”8

Bezos occasionally watched over his younger sister and brother during these years but his booming, uninhibited laugh occasionally caused problems. “We would trust Jeff to take them to movies,” Jackie Bezos says, “but the two of them would come back embarrassed, saying, ‘Jeff laughs too loud.’ It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything.”

After a two-year stop in Pensacola, the family moved again. This time, Mike Bezos’s job took them to Miami—a city Mike had first encountered fifteen years before as a penniless immigrant. Now he was an executive at Exxon, and the family bought a four-bedroom house with a backyard pool in the affluent Palmetto neighborhood in unincorporated Dade County.

Miami at the time was a tumultuous place. The drug wars were in full swing, and in 1980 the Mariel boatlift brought a mass emigration of Cubans fleeing the Communist regime. All the violence and frenetic activity barely registered in the insular worlds of Bezos and his new friends. Jeff enrolled in Miami Palmetto Senior High School, joined the science and chess clubs, drove a blue Ford Falcon station wagon with no air-conditioning, and impressed his classmates with his fierce work ethic. “He was excruciatingly focused,” says Weinstein, who lived around the corner and became one of Bezos’s best friends (the two are still close). “Not like mad-scientist focused, but he was capable of really focusing, in a crazy way, on certain things. He was extremely disciplined, which is how he is able to do all these things.”

The Bezos house was a gathering point for Jeff and his wide circle of friends. They built the homecoming science-club float in his garage and gathered there for prom after-parties. Jackie Bezos, the youngest of all the moms, commanded the kids’ respect and became a fixture in their lives. With Weinstein’s mother, she organized a neighborhood watch and conducted its meetings at her home. She could be strict. When a state trooper gave Bezos a ticket on the Dixie Highway, she made him call the friends who had been in the car with him and personally apologize.

The teenage Bezos didn’t butt heads only with his mother. When he was a senior in high school, Jackie Bezos remembers, Jeff got into a heated argument with his father over some now-forgotten ideological issue. It was ten at night when they started arguing and each was unwilling to retreat on the substance of the matter. The disagreement evolved into a full-blown quarrel but eventually broke up; Mike retreated to his bedroom and Jeff to the first-floor bathroom, which, like those in many South Florida homes at the time, had a separate door that opened onto the backyard. Jackie let them both stew for an hour and then went to check up on them. “Mike was still in the bedroom, looking like he had lost his best friend,” she says. She went downstairs and knocked on the bathroom door, but there was no answer. It was locked. She went around to the backyard, opened its outside door—and saw the bathroom was empty. The family cars were still there. “I was terribly worried,” Jackie says. “It was midnight on a weekday and he’s out there on foot. I thought, This is not good.”

While she contemplated her next move, the home phone rang. It was Jeff, calling from the closest, safest place with a pay telephone—a hospital. He didn’t want her to worry, he said, but he was not yet ready to come home. She eventually got him to let her pick him up, and they drove to a nearby all-night diner and talked for hours. He finally agreed to return home, and though it was after three a.m. and he had school that day, Jeff apparently didn’t go right to sleep. That morning, when Mike Bezos got to work, he discovered a handwritten letter from his son in his briefcase. He still carries the letter in his briefcase today.

Bezos took a series of odd jobs throughout high school. One summer he famously worked as a fryer at a local McDonald’s, learning, among other skills, how to crack an egg with one hand. Less well known was his job helping an eccentric neighbor, who decided one day that she was going to breed and sell hamsters. Bezos cleaned the cages and fed the rodents but soon found he was spending more time listening to the woman’s troubles than taking care of the animals. He apparently was a good confidant; she once called him at school and pulled him out of a class to discuss some new personal crisis. When Jackie Bezos found out about it, she put an end to the relationship.

Bezos’s high-school friends say he was ridiculously competitive. He collected awards for best science student at his school for three years and best math student for two, and he won a statewide science fair for an entry concerning the effects of a zero-gravity environment on the housefly. At some point, he announced to his classmates his intention to become the valedictorian of his 680-student class, and he crammed his schedule with honors courses to bolster his rank. “The race [for the rest of the students] then became to be number two,” says Josh Weinstein. “Jeff decided he wanted it and he worked harder than anybody else.”

Ursula Werner, Jeff’s high-school girlfriend, says he was exceedingly creative and quite a romantic. For her eighteenth birthday, he spent days crafting an elaborate scavenger hunt that sent her around Miami on bizarre and embarrassing errands, such as entering a bank to ask a teller for a million pennies and navigating a Home Depot to find a clue that was hidden under a toilet lid.

After his greasy summer at McDonald’s, Bezos wanted to avoid another low-wage job, so with Werner he created the DREAM Institute, a ten-day summer school for ten-year-olds that explored such diverse topics as Gulliver’s Travels, black holes, nuclear deterrence, and the Bezos family’s Apple II computer. The class “emphasizes the use of new ways of thinking in old areas,” according to a flier the young teachers passed out to parents. Werner said that her parents were dismissive of the class and wondered who would possibly sign up. But Bezos’s parents cheered the effort and immediately enrolled Mark and Christina. “I got the sense that Jackie and Mike were the kinds of parents who always encouraged Jeff and nurtured his creativity,” Werner says.

Bezos scored straight As at Miami Palmetto, got early admission to Princeton University, and not only became valedictorian of his high school but won the Silver Knight, a prestigious statewide award sponsored by the Miami Herald. According to Weinstein, who was there, when Jeff went to the bank to deposit his award check, the teller looked at it and said, “Oh, what do you do for the Miami Herald?” and Bezos cockily replied, “I win Silver Knights.”

Bezos wrote out his valedictory speech longhand. His mother typed it up, pausing just long enough to realize that for a high-school senior, Jeff had some wildly outlandish ambitions. She still has a copy, which includes the classic Star Trek opening, “Space, the final frontier,” and discusses his dream of saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.

These were not pie-in-the-sky ideas. They were personal goals. “Whatever image he had of his own future, it always involved becoming wealthy,” Ursula Werner says. “There was no way to get what he wanted without it.” What exactly did he want? “The reason he’s earning so much money,” Werner told journalists who contacted her in the 1990s, seeking to understand the Internet magnate, “is to get to outer space.”


In the year 2000, as Amazon was trying to restore order to its balance sheet while fighting the dot-com doubters, Bezos saw his fortune drop precipitously, from $6.1 to $2 billion.9 Still, it was an enormous sum, and it made him one of the richest people in the world. He had seen firsthand how technology, patience, and long-term thinking could pay off. And so, right at the height of the world’s skepticism about the future prospects of Amazon, Bezos secretly started an entirely new company devoted to space exploration and registered it with the state of Washington.

Bezos intended to keep his new space lab a secret. But many of his Amazon colleagues knew about his ambitions. He told Kay Dangaard, Amazon’s public relations chief in the 1990s, and she quietly tried to please him by incorporating it into the Amazon brand. She actually set up a product-placement deal to put Amazon billboards on the moon in the Eddie Murphy movie The Adventures of Pluto Nash but canceled the deal after reading the terrible script. In 1999, she tried to get NASA to allow the space shuttle Discovery astronauts to order Christmas gifts on Amazon.com from orbit. After tentatively expressing interest, the agency nixed the idea as overly commercial.

Bezos also confided his dreams to Nick Hanauer, the early Amazon investor and an unofficial board member during the company’s first five years. “He absolutely thinks he’s going to space,” Hanauer says. “It’s always been one of his goals. It’s why he started working out every morning. He’s been ridiculously disciplined about it.”

In retrospect, it almost seems like Bezos was taunting the media with his top-secret space plans. He clearly couldn’t resist obliquely referencing them. Discussing concerns about the long-term health of the planet with Wired magazine in 1999, he told an interviewer, “I wouldn’t mind helping in some way. I do think we have all our eggs in one basket.”10 He told Fast Company in 2001 that it would be great if the novel Dune, in which humanity has colonized other planets, was “nonfiction.”

In an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars. At the end of the conversation, I wondered when some brave Silicon Valley entrepreneur would start a private space company (this was two years before PayPal cofounder Elon Musk started his rocket company SpaceX). Bezos’s answer seemed particularly convoluted. “It’s a very hard technical problem and I think it’s very hard to see how you would generate a return in a reasonable amount of time on that investment,” he said. “So the answer to your question is probably yes, there probably is somebody doing it, but it’s not… when you go to venture capital conferences, it never comes up. To say it was a cold topic would be exaggerating how hot it is.”

In 2002, Bezos created a public Wish List of his own on Amazon, available for anyone to see, specifying some of his reading interests. Among the titles were The History of Space Vehicles, by Tim Furniss, and Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee. Then, in February 2003, I attended a TED conference, an annual gathering devoted to technology and design that was held back then in Monterey, California, and I overheard someone talking about a space company in Seattle called Blue. A month later, Bezos and his attorney suffered minor injuries in a helicopter accident near Alpine in West Texas—a few hundred miles from the middle of nowhere. “During… takeoff the tailboom struck a tree, aircraft rolled to side, ended up in a creek partially submerged,” read the official incident report from the Federal Aviation Administration. “The three passengers received injuries and were transported to the local hospital. Degree of injuries believed to be nonthreatening.”

Bezos later told Time magazine that his overarching thought during the accident was What a dumb way to die. It later emerged that he was looking to buy land for a Texas ranch. Bezos wanted to give his kids the same experience he’d had growing up on his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla.

He was also looking for a good place to build a launchpad.

At the time of the helicopter crash, the world knew nothing of Jeff Bezos’s space-exploration company. But it all seemed to be adding up to something. After the accident, I searched the Washington State corporate database for a company called Blue and found an entry for Blue Operations LLC that had been registered with an address of 1200 Twelfth Avenue South in Seattle—Amazon’s headquarters. The company had a mysteriously vague website advertising job openings for aerospace engineers who had expertise in areas like propulsion and avionics. I was a cub reporter for Newsweek magazine at the time, and the notion that a famous Internet billionaire was secretly building his own spaceship was too enticing to resist.

On a trip to Seattle in March of 2003, I rented a car and, late at night, drove to another address I had found in the Washington State corporate records for Blue, this one located in an industrial zone south of Seattle along the Duwamish Waterway. At that address was a fifty-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse with a blue awning over the front door imprinted with the words Blue Origin in white letters.

Though it was late on a weekend night, the lights were on and a few cars and motorcycles were parked out front. I couldn’t see anything through the covered windows and there was no one outside. The air smelled heavily of river water and processed lumber. I sat in the rental car, just wondering, indulging visions of secret spaceships and billionaire-funded missions to Mars. But I had nothing to go on, and it was intensely frustrating. After an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out, walked quietly across the street to a trash can, removed an armful of its contents, walked back to the car, and dumped it in the trunk.

A few weeks later, for Newsweek magazine, I wrote the first story about Blue Origin, entitled “Bezos in Space.”11 Aided by an extremely convenient discovery I’d made that night—a sheaf of coffee-stained drafts of a Blue Origin mission statement—I reported that the long-term mission of the firm was to create an enduring human presence in space. The company was building a spaceship called New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, the pioneering Mercury astronaut, which would take tourists into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The unique designs called for a vertical takeoff and thrusters to control a vertical landing so that the vehicle could be economically reused. The startup was also funding forward-looking research into new propulsion systems, like wave rotors and rockets powered by ground-based lasers.

A few days after my visit to Blue Origin’s warehouse, I e-mailed all these details to Bezos to let him know what would be in the article and to try to elicit a reaction. I’ve since lost the message I sent, but in my breathless quest I must have implied that he had grown impatient with the progress of manned space travel inside NASA. I kept his reply:

Brad, I’m travelling and responding by Blackberry—maybe you’ll get this.

It’s way premature for Blue to say anything or comment on anything because we haven’t done anything worthy of comment. If you’re interested in this topic over the coming years, we’ll keep it in mind for when we have anything worth saying. Some of what you have below is right and some is wrong. I will comment on one thing because you touched a nerve, and I think it’s hurtful to the people of NASA. There should be a counterpoint.

NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA. The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.

If you want a specific example: consider that all these companies use extremely sophisticated computer codes for analyzing things like structures, heat flows and aerodynamics, which codes were developed (over many years and meticulously tested against physical reality) by NASA!

Jeff

There was a smattering of media coverage after the Newsweek article but Blue Origin continued to labor in secret. Bezos acquired his Texas ranch using anonymous corporate entities named after historic explorers (enterprises like James Cook LP and Coronado Ventures) to make generous offers to landowners around Van Horn, Texas, not far from where his helicopter had gone down.12 By 2005 he owned 290,000 acres—an area about a third of the size of Rhode Island. He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.

In a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, Bezos said that Blue Origin’s goal was to drive down the cost and increase the safety of technology that can get humans into space. The group was “working to lower the cost of space flight to build a future where we humans can explore the solar system firsthand and in person,” he said. “Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.”

Progress may be slower than Bezos and his rocket scientists first imagined. In 2011, a Blue Origin test vehicle spun out of control at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet, leaving a spectacular fireball in the sky that reminded Van Horn residents of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. “Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post on the Blue Origin website.13 A year after that, the company successfully tested the spaceship’s crew-capsule escape system. It has received two grants from NASA worth more than $25 million to develop technologies related to human spaceflight. Internet magnate Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of an enterprise called Virgin Galactic, are pursuing some of the same goals.

Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities. In 2006, the company moved to larger headquarters in Kent, Washington, twenty miles south of Seattle. Visitors describe a facility studded with Bezos’s space collectibles, like props from Star Trek, rocket parts from various spaceships throughout history, and a real cosmonaut suit from the Soviet Union. Engineers zoom around the 280,000-square-foot facility on Segways. In the atrium of the building, there is a full-scale steampunk model of a Victorian-era spaceship as it might have been described in the fiction of Jules Verne, complete with a cockpit, brass controls, and nineteenth-century furnishings. Visitors can venture inside, sit on the velvet-covered seats, and imagine themselves as intrepid explorers in the time of Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg. “To an imaginative child, it would look like an artifact,” says Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis.

Like other great entrepreneurs, including Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, Bezos was turning imagination into reality, the fancies of his youth into actual physical things. “Space for Jeff is not a year 2000 or a year 2010 opportunity,” says Hillis. “It’s been a dream of humanity’s for centuries and it will continue to be one for centuries. Jeff sees himself and Blue Origin as part of that bigger story. It’s the next step in what Jules Verne was writing about and what the Apollo missions accomplished.”

Bezos did not hesitate to embrace the responsibilities that came with pursuing this passion. Even as Amazon struggled to maintain orbit, he collected new obligations and hired more employees for Blue Origin and then devised clever ways to divide his time among all his responsibilities in the most efficient manner possible. He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. “I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.”14

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