Jeffrey Bezos went from being a boy with a love of how things work to being the man who built Amazon.com into an online retail powerhouse.

With his purchase of The Washington Post, the Internet entrepreneur added a slice of the news business to investments that include such multimillion-dollar leaps in the dark as private space travel.

Bezos's penchant for experimenting reportedly dates to such a young age that one widely recounted story tells that while just a toddler he tried to dismantle his own crib.

His mother was a teenager when she gave birth to "Jeff" in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Jan 12, 1964.

She remarried when her son was about 4 years old, and he was legally adopted by his Cuban immigrant stepfather who worked as an engineer at a major petrochemical company.

Bezos was enchanted by computer science when the IT industry was in its infancy and studied engineering at Princeton University.

After graduating he put his skills to work on Wall Street where by 1990 he had risen to be a senior vice-president at investment firm D.E. Shaw.

He surprised peers by leaving his high-paid position about four years later to open an online bookseller called Amazon.com, which has grown into a massively successful online retail empire and made Bezos a multibillionaire.

AFP

(China Daily 08/07/2013 page10)