4. Jeff’s a true Trekkie
One advantage of being super-rich is that people indulge your fantasies. As a life-long Star Trek fan, Mr Bezos was able to secure a minor role in the latest movie.
But you may find it hard to spot him on film, since the Vine he posted shows him pretty effectively disguised in a wrinkly grey mask.
He has never really disguised his inner geek however.
As a child he spent a lot of time with his grandparents on their Texas ranch (learning to vaccinate cattle amongst other vital skills) and his interest in number-crunching was already apparent.
“At that age I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage, I’d figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending,” he told Princeton’s class of 2010.
For example he whiled away some time calculating that smoking would be likely to take nine years off his grandmother’s life.
“I expected to be awarded for my cleverness and my arithmetic skills,” he said. But his grandmother burst into tears.
Grandfather talked him through how sometimes “it’s harder to be kind than clever”.
5. He can do blue sky thinking
As well as the fun stuff he has a serious futuristic vision.
Early on he was already imagining space hotels, amusement parks, and cities orbiting the Earth. And Mr Bezos’s dreams are getting bigger.
“I want millions of people living and working in space. I want us to be a space-faring civilisation,” he told Geekwire last year.
He predicts that in the next few hundred years we will put all our heavy industry off this planet, mine resources and generate energy in space, leaving earth a much more pleasant place to live on.
Mr Bezos does plan to go into space himself too, of course – once Blue Origin is ready to take him.
But as Blue Origin’s slogan says: Gradatim Ferociter, (apparently Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously”) maybe he’s not rushing things.
Highs – and lows
1994 Quits Wall Street job to start Amazon
1999 Named Time’s Person of the Year
2000 Launches Blue Origin spaceflight firm
2013 Buys the Washington Post
2015 New York Times publishes report painting a critical picture of working conditions at Amazon, which Mr Bezos says he “doesn’t recognise”
2015 Amazon appears to have come full circle when it opens its first physical bookstore in Seattle
2016 Drawn into a public spat with Trump over the Washington Post and taxes
2017 Manchester By The Sea, a feature produced by Amazon Studios, wins two Oscars including best actor for Casey Affleck, while the studio also picks up the Best Foreign Language gong for The Salesman.
Source: BBC News