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.”

🚨L.P. Gise was Jeff Bezos’ grandfather. In the late ’50s, he helped found what would become DARPA. In the early-mid ’60s, he headed the AEC’s 7 state, 26,000 employee operation.

I went after his FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.#FOIA pic.twitter.com/RdIlpsx3XB

— John Greenewald, Jr. (@blackvaultcom) May 6, 2024

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.”

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.

— Patrick Webb (@RealPatrickWebb) May 6, 2024