Bezos I

Album: Inside (The Songs) (2021)
Charted: 44
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Songfacts®:

  • Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen to Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 12, 1964. After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos.

    Bezos came up with the idea of an online bookstore on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. He launched The Amazon.com online shop on July 16, 1995, working out of his garage in Seattle. It has since extended to selling CDs, video games, DVDs, electronic items, clothes, furniture and food, plus publishing video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization.

    Naturally, Bezos has made more than a fair few dollars out of his company. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, his wealth grew by approximately $24 billion, and here Bo Burnham takes issue with the Amazon founder as a symbol of wealth inequality.
  • When Burnham recorded this song Bezos topped the annual Forbes list of billionaires. This made him the richest man in the world, outrivalling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and business magnate Warren Buffet. Here, Burnham sarcastically praises Bezos by noting how this stepson of a Cuban immigrant has surpassed his fellow moguls.
  • Bo Burnham recorded the song for his Netflix special Bo Burnham: Inside, released on May 30, 2021. The comedian and musician dropped an album of songs from the special, Inside (The Songs). "Bezos I" is the seventh track on the record, which he reprises later with the equally satirical "Bezos II."
  • The song garnered increased interest when Jeff Bezos flew to space on July 20, 2021 alongside his brother Mark Bezos and two others. The Amazon mogul launched nine days after fellow business magnate Richard Branson flew to space (suborbital) on board The Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission. Amid criticism that billionaires going to space is an expensive waste, Bezos also drew condemnation for saying that Amazon workers and customers "paid for all of this."

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