Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman, media owner, investor, computer engineer, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder and CEO of Amazon, where he previously served as President and CEO. With a net worth of around US$196 billion as of January 2022, Bezos is the second richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the third richest person according to Forbes.
Bezos was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami, and graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a road trip across the country from New York City to Seattle. The company started as an online bookstore and has since expanded to include a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world’s largest online sales company, largest Internet company by revenue, and the world’s largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services subsidiary.
Bezos founded the space manufacturer and orbital spaceflight service subsidiary Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft arrived in space in 2015, after which it successfully landed on Earth. The company completed its first commercial suborbital human spaceflight in July 2021. He also bought the major US newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, and is managing several other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded biotechnology company Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.
The number one billionaire on the Forbes Wealth Index, Bezos was named the “richest man in modern history” after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In August 2020, according to Forbes magazine, his net worth exceeded $200 billion. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, his fortune grew by nearly $24 billion. On July 5, 2021, Bezos resigned as CEO of Amazon and moved to the position of CEO; Andy Gacy, Amazon’s head of cloud computing, replaced Bezos as Amazon’s CEO. On July 20, 2021, he traveled to space with his brother Mark. The suborbital flight took more than 10 minutes, and reached a peak altitude of 66.5 miles (107.0 km).
Jeff Bezos Net Worth
Bezos first became a millionaire in 1997 after raising $54 million through Amazon’s initial public offering (IPO). He was first included on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list in 1999 with a registered net worth of $10.1 billion. His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later, a 40.5% drop. His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion. He lost $500 million the following year, which brought his net worth down to $1.5 billion. The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion. From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion. After the financial crisis and succeeding economic recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion—a 17.7% drop. His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion. This percentage increase ascended him to the 43rd spot on the ranking from 68th.
After a rumor broke out that Amazon was developing a smartphone, Bezos’s net worth rose to $30.5 billion in 2014. A year later, Bezos entered the top ten when he increased his net worth to a total of $50.3 billion. Bezos rose to be the 5th richest person in the world hours before market close; he gained $7 billion in one hour. By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion. However, just months later in October 2016, his wealth increased by $16.2 billion to $66.5 billion unofficially ranking him the third richest person in the world behind Warren Buffett. After sporadic jumps in Amazon’s share price, in July 2017 he briefly unseated Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world.
Bezos would continue to outrun Gates on and off throughout October 2017 after Amazon’s stock price fluctuated. His net worth exceeded $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon’s stock price rose more than 2.5%. When the 2017 list was released, Bezos’ net worth was recorded at $72.8 billion, an addition of $27.6 billion from the previous year. Bezos was officially ranked as the third richest person in the world from fifth in 2016. The rapid growth of his wealth from 2016 to 2017 has prompted a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a reduced and controlled time scale. On October 10, 2017, it generated an estimated $6.24 billion in 5 minutes, slightly less than the annual GDP of Kyrgyzstan.
On March 6, 2018, Bezos was ranked as the richest person in the world with a recorded net worth of $112 billion. He overthrew Bill Gates ($90 billion), who was $6 billion ahead of Warren Buffett ($84 billion), and ranked third. He is the first recorded billionaire (not adjusted for inflation).
His fortune, in 2017-18, was the equivalent of 2.7 million Americans. Bezos’ net worth increased by $33.6 billion from January 2017 to January 2018. This increase has outpaced the economic development (in terms of GDP) of more than 96 countries around the world. During March 9, Bezos earned $230,000 every 60 seconds.
Motley Fool estimated that if Bezos had not sold any of his shares from his original public offering in 1997, his net worth would have reached $181 billion in 2018. According to Quartz, his net worth of $150 billion in July 2018 was enough to buy all Stock markets in Nigeria, Hungary, Egypt, Luxembourg and Iran. After the Quartz report, Amazon workers in Poland (Germany) and Spain participated in labor demonstrations and strikes to draw attention to his growing wealth, lack of compensation, labor rights, and satisfactory working conditions for selected Amazon workers. On July 17, 2018, he was named the “richest person in modern history” by Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, Market Watch, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
In 2019, Bezos’ wealth declined after his divorce from his wife MacKenzie Bezos. According to Forbes, had Washington common law applied to their divorce without a prenuptial agreement, Bezos’ fortune could have been equitably divided with his ex-wife; However, she eventually acquired 25% of Bezos’ shares in Amazon, which is valued at around $36 billion, making her the third richest woman in the world. Bezos retained his interest in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as controlling voting in shares that his ex-wife received.
In June 2019, Bezos purchased three contiguous apartments overlooking Madison Square Park in Manhattan, including a penthouse, for a total of US$80 million, making it one of the most expensive real estate purchases in New York City in 2019.
In February 2020, Bezos purchased Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million, a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area. Lachlan Murdoch paid the previous record high price of $150 million for Chartwell Mansion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos’ fortune was reported to have grown by $24 billion, citing increased demand from households when closed shopping at Amazon.
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Jeff Bezos Personal Life
In 1992, Bezos was working for D. E. Shaw in Manhattan when he met novelist MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research associate at the firm; the couple married a year later.[45][230] In 1994, they moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, where Bezos founded Amazon.[231] Bezos and his now ex-wife MacKenzie are the parents of four children: three sons, and one daughter adopted from China.
In March 2003, Bezos was one of three passengers in a helicopter that crashed in West Texas after the craft’s tail boom hit a tree.[233] Bezos sustained minor injuries and was discharged from a local hospital the same day.
In 2016, Bezos played a Starfleet official in the movie Star Trek Beyond, and joined the cast and crew at a San Diego Comic-Con screening. He had lobbied Paramount for the role apropos of Alexa and his personal/professional interest in speech recognition. His one line consisted of a response to an alien in distress: “Speak Normally.” In his initial discussion of the project which became Alexa with his technical advisor Greg Hart in 2011, Bezos told him that the goal was to create “the Star Trek computer.”[235] Bezos’s family office Zefram LLC is named after Zefram Cochrane, a character from Star Trek.