What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search.
One year before Gise died in 1995, Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home.
Or so we’re told…
John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.”
News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb commented on Greenewald’s findings, saying, “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.”
With the contents of Gise’s FBI file unlikely to ever be unearthed and likely never destroyed, just inaccessible to FOIA requests or the public, other X users commented on Webb’s and Greenewald’s posts, pointing out how DARPA possibly created other big tech firms:
Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon, given Bezos’ grandfather’s connection to the secret agency.
