The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (21 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”

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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.
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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.