Maybe you’ve heard of the world’s richest man — Jeff Bezos? You know the CEO of Amazon. But you probably didn’t know he learned his resourcefulness from working on his grandparents’ South Texas ranch each summer.
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Bezos said his grandfather was “full of wisdom” and “he did everything himself.” He quickly learned if there’s a problem, there’s a solution.
“I was so young, and it was useful. I was a handful, I’m sure. Anyway, he created the illusion for me when I was 4 years old that I was helping him on the ranch. Which, of course, cannot have been true. But I believed it. And by the time I was 16, of course, I was actually helping on the ranch. I could fix prolapsed cattle; we did all our own veterinary work. Some of the cattle even survived,” says Bezos. “And we fixed windmills, and laid water pipelines, and built fences, and barns, and fixed the bulldozer.”
Bezos is the first person to top $100 billion as number one on the Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires. He owns 16 percent of e-commerce colossus Amazon, which he founded in a garage in Seattle in 1994. Bezos attended Princeton and worked at a hedge fund before quitting to sell books online. In 2013, he purchased The Washington Post in a $250 million deal.
Bezos also owns a “ranch.” Purchased in 2004, the Corn Ranch serves as the base of operations for Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Bezos in 2000. The 165,000-acre spread located just north of Van Horn, Texas is the test site for the New Shepard rocket, a vertical-launching, vertical-landing manned suborbital vehicle has been in development for the last decade and took its first flight in April 2015.
