John Greenewald Jr., the owner of The Black Vault, mentioned in a tweet that Jeff Bezos’ grandfather was a co-founder of DARPA, raising questions about DARPA’s role in creating Amazon.
Unknown to most people, Lawrence Preston Gise, the grandfather of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was involved in the creation of the Pentagon’s top-secret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later renamed DARPA) in 1958. Many years later, DARPA created the internet and sparked innovations in speech recognition, high-speed networking, and online search.
Bezos started Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home, a year before Gise passed away in 1995.
The owner of The Black Vault, a website that makes declassified government data available through FOIA requests, John Greenewald Jr., wrote on X that he pursued Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.”
In response to Greenewald’s discoveries, Patrick Webb of the news website Leading Report stated, “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.”
Interestingly, as reported by GreatGameIndia earlier, there have been other incidents that raise questions about Amazon’s practices. According to a June 4 last year blog post on Medium, Amazon locked a Microsoft engineer, Brandon Jackson, out of his smart home devices over false racism claims.
Other X users reacted on Webb’s and Greenewald’s posts, pointing out how DARPA might have built other large tech companies, given that the contents of Gise’s FBI file are unlikely to ever be discovered and probably never destroyed—they are simply unavailable to the public or FOIA requests.
Given Bezos’ grandfather’s affiliation with the secret organization, questions have been raised regarding DARPA’s role in creating Amazon.
