Skip to content

Thursday, Jul. 1, 2021

Was Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos flipping burgers at McDonald’s at 23 years old?

Christiana Dillard, Lead Stories

no

At 23, Jeff Bezos was a Princeton University graduate who turned down various job offers to work for a start-up telecommunications company.

A social media post meant to inspire featured images of author J.K. Rowling, Bezos, former President Barack Obama and entrepreneur Walt Disney with a brief description of how at the age of 23 each was far from their eventual success.

In the case of billionaire Bezos, however, the post got it wrong by saying he was flipping burgers at 23.

Wired published a profile of Bezos in 1999 that mentioned Bezos' work as a McDonald's cook — at age 16. There, Bezos studied the company's workflow technology and brainstormed improvements.

Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986, the year he turned 22. During his senior year at the university, he already had job offers from companies including Intel. He decided to join Fitel, a telecommunications startup.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

Learn More

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.