The world’s most famous Palmetto High grad is stepping aside as CEO of Amazon
The most financially successful graduate Miami-Dade County Public Schools has ever produced is stepping aside.
Jeff Bezos, who graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High in 1982 and went on to create e-commerce giant Amazon.com, will become executive chairman of the company sometime in the fall, Amazon said Tuesday. Andy Jessy, a longtime Bezos lieutenant and head of Amazon’s cloud services unit, will become CEO.
Bezos was valedictorian, National Merit Scholar and a Silver Knight award winner for science as a high school student in Pinecrest. He told the Miami Herald in his Silver Knight interview that he wanted to “build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth.”
Today, Amazon is worth $1.7 trillion — among the top three most-valuable in the world — and employs some 800,000 workers worldwide.
In 2018, the Miami metro area was named a long-list finalist for Amazon’s HQ2, which promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion investment for the winning site of what would be Amazon’s largest corporate presence outside of Seattle. Though a tri-county South Florida bid fell short, Bezos did spend time in Miami during the bidding process — including a night out at LIV nightclub on Miami Beach.
More recently, Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, donated more than $4 billion to charities nationwide, including six in South Florida: Easterseals South Florida, Meals on Wheels South Florida, YWCA South Florida, United Way Palm Beach, United Way of Miami-Dade and United Way of Broward.
Bezos moved to Florida as a teenager from Texas, where his father, Mike, had worked in the oil industry. Mike, who adopted Bezos as an infant, has his own Miami connection: He is a “Pedro Pan” kid. A Cuban immigrant, Mike’s parents put him on a plane to Miami alone at the age of 16 in 1962 as the Castro regime consolidated power. He spent four months at Camp Matecumbe before settling in Wilmington, Delaware, where a high school was giving scholarships to Cuban refugees.
Mike Bezos went on to graduate from the University of Albuquerque in New Mexico and had a decades-long career at Exxon.
“I’m a Cuban first, but I always feel very proud to be American at the same time,” Mike Bezos said in a 2016 interview with the National Museum of American History. “At home, the language was English, and it wasn’t until later when the kids were growing up that we brought Spanish back, because whenever we got together with my Cuban family, it was all Spanish. Jackie, my wife, who speaks perfect Spanish, learned Spanish because she wanted to know what my mother was saying about her and she found out that my mother loved her.
The elder Bezos continued: “My wife makes some amazing Cuban food, and my kids love Cuban food. You know, celebrating, getting our family together for Christmas, is big for us. I have never lost that Cuban identity and I never will, but at the same time I learned what Thanksgiving was all about.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:18 PM.
