Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos 2005
Born	Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen (1964-01-12) January 12, 1964 (age 48) Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.
Alma mater	Princeton University
Occupation	Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com
Net worth	US$ 18.4 billion (2012)[1]
Awards	Time Person of the Year 1999

Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (/beɪzəs/, born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

Early life and career[link]

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen.^[2] His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him.^[3] At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.^[4]

Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos. Miguel was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old, worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married, and legally adopted Jeff. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."^[5]

Bezos often showed intense scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for science projects.^{[citation needed]} The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982.^[6] He was high school valedictorian.^[7] He attended Princeton University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science.

According to Nick Hanauer (an early investor in Amazon) and "others who know [him]"^[5], Bezos is a libertarian; such beliefs are said to have help motivate Amazon.com's aggressive "efforts to avoid collecting sales taxes on purchases made on its website" and the company's unwillingness to engage in "sponsorships, matching grants or employee volunteer programs".^[5]

Business career[link]

After graduating from Princeton University in 1986, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field.^[8] Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. He next worked at Bankers Trust, where he became vice-president. Later on he also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co.

Amazon.com[link]

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage.^[9] He had left his "well-paying job" at a New York City hedge fund when he "learned about the rapid growth in Internet use", which coincided with a "then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling [that] online retailers don't have to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence"; he had headed to Washington because its relatively small population meant fewer of his future customers would have to pay sales tax.^[5]

Amazon eventually made him one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs and a billionaire. Bezos' salary as CEO was $81,840 in 2010, in addition to the $1.6 million cost of his personal security detail.^[10] He owns 20% of Amazon's stock and forgoes stock options.

According to Forbes, Amazon's shares have "defied gravity" in 2011, jumping 55% and adding $6.5 billion to his net worth.^[11]

Bezos is known for his attention to business details. As described by Portfolio.com, he "is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager. ... an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases."^[9]

Blue Origin[link]

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company,^[12] partially as a result of his fascination with space travel,^[13] including an early interest in developing "space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth."^[7] The company was kept under wraps for a half dozen years and initially became publicly known only in 2006 when purchasing a sizable aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility.^[14]

In a 2011 interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help enable "anybody to go into space" and stated that the company is committed to decreasing the cost and increasing the safety of spaceflight.^[15] Blue Origin is "one of several start-ups aiming to open up space travel to paying customers. Like Amazon, the company is secretive, but [in September 2011] revealed that it had lost an unmanned prototype vehicle during a short-hop test flight. Although this was a setback, the announcement of the loss revealed for the first time just how far Blue Origin’s team had advanced."^[13] Bezos said that the crash was 'not the outcome that any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard.'" ^[13]

Recognition[link]

He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.^[16] In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders.^[17] Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. ^[18]

He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.^[19]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jeff Bezos at TED Conferences
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose
• Jeff Bezos at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Jeff Bezos in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Jeff Bezos collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Jeff Bezos at the Notable Names Database
• Condé Nast Portfolio Executive Profile - Portfolio.com (August 2007)
• Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos - Fastcompany.com (August 2004)

Dr. Werner Vogels
Werner Vogels
Born	(1958-10-03) October 3, 1958 (age 53) Ermelo, The Netherlands
Occupation	VP and CTO of Amazon.com

Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington.

In charge of driving technology innovation within the company, Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities. He is the only executive apart from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos to speak publicly on behalf of Amazon.com.

Career[link]

From 1994 until 2004, Dr. Vogels was a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. He mainly conducted research in scalable reliable enterprise systems. From 1999 through 2002 he also held a Vice President and Chief Technology position at Reliable Network Solutions, Inc. From 1991 through 1994 he was a senior researcher at INESC in Lisbon, Portugal. Vogels received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands with Prof. Henri Bal and Prof. Andy Tanenbaum as his advisors.^[1] He is the author of many conference and journal articles, mainly on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing systems.

He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the Director of Systems Research. He was named Chief Technology Officer in January 2005 and Vice President, World-wide Architecture in March of that year.

Vogels maintains a technology oriented weblog named “All Things Distributed” which he started in 2001 while he was still a scientist at Cornell.^[2] It was mainly used to discuss early results of his research. After he joined Amazon.com the nature of the weblog changed to more product oriented with some general technology and industry writings.

Vogels described the deep technical nature of Amazon's infrastructure work in a paper about Amazon's Dynamo, the storage engine for the Amazon Shopping Cart.^[3] He is in general regarded as one of the world's top experts on ultra-scalable systems and he uses his weblog to educate the community about issues such as eventual consistency.

During 2008 it became evident that Vogels was one of the architects behind Amazon’s approach to Cloud Computing, the Amazon Web Services (AWS). During that year Vogels was continuously on the road to promote Cloud Computing and AWS and its benefits to the industry.

Awards[link]

Information Week recognized Vogels for educational and promotional role in Cloud Computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award.^[4] In an accompanying interview with Vogels provides some details of the history of his work at Amazon.^[5]

Other awards include the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of the Year Award.^[6] In 2010 readers of ReadWriteWeb voted on the "Cloud's Most Influential Executive" and selected Vogels with a double digit margin.^[7]

Private life[link]

Vogels is married to Annet Vogels, a former musician with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. They have two daughters, Laura Vogels and Kim Vogels, who both studied Drama and Theater Arts in London, UK and moved to New York City after completing their studies.

References[link]

1. ^ Scalable Cluster Technologies for Mission Critical Enterprise Computing
2. ^ All Things Distributed Weblog
3. ^ Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store, SOSP, 2007
4. ^ Chief of the Year; Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
5. ^ Q&A: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
6. ^ "Europe’s fastest growing digital media companies 2009". Media Momentum. http://de.buyvip.com/mediadecorator/pdf/MML09.pdf. Retrieved 2 September 2011. 
7. ^ Williams, Alex. "Weekly Poll: Who is the Cloud's Most Influential Executive?". ReadWriteWeb. http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/weekly-poll-who-is-the-clouds.php. Retrieved 2 September 2011. 

External links[link]

• A conversation with Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, ACM Queue vol.4, no.4 - May 2006.
• A podcast interview with Vogels on architecture and distributed systems, Software Engineering Radio, Episode 40, Dec 2006.
• Discipline and Focus, ACM QueueCast Interview, 2006

Carl Bernstein
Bernstein at the 2007 Texas Book Festival
Born	(1944-02-14) February 14, 1944 (age 68) Washington, D.C., USA
Education	University of Maryland (did not graduate)
Occupation	Journalist, Writer
Employer	Vanity Fair
Known for	Reporting on Watergate scandal
Religion	Judaism
Spouse	Nora Ephron (1976-1980) Christine (present)
Children	Jacob Bernstein, Max Bernstein
Parents	Alfred Bernstein and Sylvia Walker

Carl Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstiːn/ BURN-steen; born February 14, 1944) is an American investigative journalist who, at The Washington Post, teamed up with Bob Woodward; the two did the majority of the most important news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations, the indictment of a vast number of White House Officials such as H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and John Mitchell, and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. For his role in breaking the scandal, Bernstein received many awards; his work helped earn the Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973.

In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Bernstein revealed that over 400 US journalists had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (Operation Mockingbird), secretly carrying out assignments and publishing news stories for them.^[1]

Career[link]

Watergate
Events
Timeline "White House horrors" 1972 presidential election Watergate burglaries White House tapes "Saturday Night Massacre" United States v. Nixon Inauguration of Gerald Ford
People
Watergate Burglars: James McCord Bernard Barker Frank Sturgis Virgilio Gonzalez Eugenio Martinez Committee to Re-Elect the President: Jeb Magruder John N. Mitchell Robert Mardian Fred LaRue Kenneth Parkinson Maurice Stans The White House: John Dean E. Howard Hunt Egil Krogh G. Gordon Liddy John Ehrlichman H. R. Haldeman Charles Colson Gordon C. Strachan Alexander Butterfield Richard Nixon Judicial: Archibald Cox Leon Jaworski John Sirica Journalists: Carl Bernstein Bob Woodward Intelligence Community: Richard Helms James Schlesinger L. Patrick Gray W. Mark Felt ("Deep Throat")
Groups
Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP) "White House Plumbers" Senate Watergate Committee The Washington Post
v t e

Bernstein began working for The Washington Post in 1966 and played an integral role in his partnership with Bob Woodward during the Watergate scandal. Bernstein was the first to suspect that Nixon played a part, and Bernstein found the laundered check that linked Nixon to the burglary.^[2]

Bernstein quit The Washington Post in 1976. He did not realize the same level of post-Watergate success that Woodward did; his frequent appearances in gossip columns resulting from the book written by his second wife, screenwriter Nora Ephron (see below), his arrest for drunk driving,^[3] and his dating of Hollywood celebrities overshadowed his journalistic accomplishments.^[2] Notably, Washington Post owner Katharine Graham did not invite him to the newspaper's 70th birthday gala, which was widely regarded as a snub, given Bernstein's contributions toward bringing the Post to international stature.^[2]

After leaving the Post, he worked as the Washington Bureau Chief and as a senior correspondent for ABC News, taught at New York University, and contributed to Time. Bernstein authored two books with Woodward: All the President's Men, which details the successes and failures of their journalistic efforts against the backdrop of the unfolding scandal, and The Final Days, a recounting of the concluding months of the Nixon presidency, although Woodward questioned Bernstein's contributions to the latter book and reportedly did not want to list Bernstein as a co-author.^[2] Woodward said, "It was not the most productive time for Carl."^[2] Woodward reportedly turned down offers to again work with Bernstein on an investigative column or any further books.^[2]

He co-authored the book His Holiness: John Paul II & the History of Our Time with Marco Politi. In it, he stated that he believed the Soviets saw Pope John Paul II as a serious threat to their survival and to that of communism in general, and believed that the downfall of communism in Europe was due to the Pope's underground work.^[4]

Following the May 2005 revelation of the identity of Deep Throat, Bernstein contributed to Woodward's book The Secret Man, which pertains to Woodward's relationship with Mark Felt.

Bernstein wrote a memoir, a "pained, loving, intensely felt account of his parents' ordeal, and his own emotional upheaval, during President Harry Truman's loyalty purges."^[5] He has also written a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, published by Alfred A. Knopf on June 5, 2007.

He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine.

Personal[link]

In his 1989 memoir Loyalties, Bernstein revealed that his parents had been members of the Communist Party, which shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents were party members.^[2] Bernstein's parents were allegedly persecuted during the 1950s. The FBI conducted surveillance on his family over a 30 year period producing over 2,500 pages of documents, including notes taken by agents staking out his bar mitzvah.^[6]

Bernstein graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. He subsequently attended the University of Maryland, College Park, but did not graduate. Bernstein, who is Jewish, is a lifetime member of the Aleph Zadik Aleph, and B'nai B'rith, and once was President of B'nai B'rith's Northern Region.^{[citation needed]}

Bernstein met Margaret Jay, daughter of British Prime Minister James Callaghan and wife of Peter Jay, then UK ambassador to the United States. They had a much-publicised extramarital relationship in 1979. Margaret later became a government minister in her own right.^[7] Bernstein and his second wife, screenwriter Nora Ephron, already had an infant son, Jacob, and she was pregnant with their second son, Max, in 1979 when she learned of her husband's affair with Jay. Ephron delivered Max prematurely after finding out.^[8] Writer Ephron was inspired by the events to write the 1983 novel Heartburn,^[7] which was made into a 1986 film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. In the thinly fictionalized book, Ephron gave unflattering depictions of both Jay and Bernstein, writing of a husband who was “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind"^[8] and saying that Jay looked like a giraffe with "big feet."^[8]

Bernstein then became known for dating Bianca Jagger, Martha Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor.^[2]

He currently resides in New York with his wife, Christine. He has also been seen strolling around the Hamptons in Sag Harbor, NY.

Portrayals[link]

• Bernstein was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film version of All the President's Men.
• Bernstein was portrayed by Bruce McCulloch in the 1999 comedy film Dick.
• In the film Heartburn, Jack Nicholson's role was a thinly-veiled portrayal of Bernstein.

Books authored[link]

• All the President's Men - With Bob Woodward (1974) ISBN 0-671-21781-X,
• The Final Days - With Bob Woodward (1976) ISBN 0-671-22298-8
• Loyalties: A Son's Memoir - (1989)
• His Holiness: John Paul II & the History of Our Time - With Marco Politi (1996)
• The Secret Man - With Bob Woodward (2005) ISBN 0-7432-8715-0
• A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton - (2007) ISBN 0-375-40766-9

See also[link]

• Phone hacking scandal comparisons with Watergate

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Carl Bernstein

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Carl Bernstein

• Carl Bernstein official site
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Carl Bernstein on Charlie Rose
• Carl Bernstein at the Internet Movie Database
• Carl Bernstein collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Works by or about Carl Bernstein in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Carl Bernstein at the Notable Names Database
• Profile at Random House
• Proffile at Simon and Schuster
• Profile at The Washington Post
• Watergate Papers Web Exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, with inventory

Articles

• Carl Bernstein. The CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 20, 1977
• 'Deep Throat' brings Watergate pair together again, a New York Times story from the International Herald Tribune, June 3, 2005
• Carl Bernstein takes an in-depth look at the fascinating life and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton in his book "A Woman in Charge", October 18, 2007