1964-
Chairman of Amazon.com

Pioneering Spirit.

The Bezos family can trace its American roots to Colonel Robert Hall, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century moved to San Antonio, Texas, from his home in Tennessee. Bezos's great-great grandfather, Bernhardt Vesper, acquired a 25,000-acre ranch in Cotulla in the southern part of Texas, where young Jeffrey Preston Bezos spent summers with his grandparents. The pioneering spirit seems to be part of the family bloodline, even if the new frontier lies in cyberspace. Born on 12 January 1964, when his mother, Jackie Bezos, was only seventeen years old, Jeff Bezos never knew his father. "I've never been curious about him," he explains. "My real father is the guy who raised me." Yet another pioneer, Mike Bezos, a Cuban refugee who came to the United States by himself at the age of fifteen, married Jeff's mother and raised Jeff...