When Jeffrey Preston Bezos graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High in 1982, he had big plans to change the world.
The valedictorian, National Merit Scholar and Silver Knight award winner for science told the Miami Herald he wanted to “build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth.”
Eventually, his grand plan included getting everybody off the blue planet and turning it into a big park of sorts.
“Even when he was in high school, all the teachers who taught him knew Jeff was something special and that he would be going places,” said Palmetto science teacher Cullen Bullock, a 33-year veteran at the school.
Bezos certainly did change the world, founding Amazon.com, the largest retailer on the World Wide Web, and creating a model for Internet sales.
And on Monday, he made jaws drop again with reports that he had purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men with a net worth of more than $22 billion, said he intends to apply his savvy as an e-merchant to one of the premier newspapers in the world, which has been struggling financially.
