Newsmaker: Who is Jeffrey P Bezos?

The Washington Post, the famed American daily that broke the story of the Watergate scandal leading to the 1974 fall of President Richard Nixon, is being sold to Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P Bezos for $250 million.

In a surprise deal announced on Monday, Bezos, one of the world's richest men, will become the sole owner of the Post and affiliated publications when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days.

In a message to employees on Monday, Washington Post Company CEO Don Graham quoted billionaire investor Warren Buffett, a longtime adviser to The Post Co, calling Bezos "the ablest CEO in America."

Bezos wrote in his memo to Post employees that the paper "will need to experiment" in the years to come, adding that he was "excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention."

Here are some biographic details on the newsmaker:

NAME: Jeff Bezos

BORN: January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, N.M.

AGE: 49

OCCUPATION: Founder, CEO of Amazon.com Inc.

EDUCATION: Graduated from Princeton summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1986 in electrical engineering and computer science.

CAREER: After college, Bezos held jobs at several Wall Street companies, including the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Bezos left the hedge fund in 1994 to start what became Amazon.com. In 2000, he founded Blue Origin to develop a vertical takeoff and landing rocketship that would fly passengers to suborbital space.

OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS: Named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.

NET WORTH: Bezos has amassed a $25 billion fortune, based on the most recent estimates by Forbes magazine.