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Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Billionaire’s Inspiring Story

Amazon

Jeff Bezos is the world’s second-richest individual, surpassing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and famed investor Warren Buffett in terms of personal wealth.

As of this writing, Bezos’ net worth is $203 billion, according to the data. As of November 2021, Jeff Bezos’ net worth had topped $200 billion, making him the world’s second-richest person.

Jeff Bezos is an e-commerce pioneer and the founder and CEO of Amazon. He also owns Washington Post and Blue Origin, a space exploration business. After graduating, he worked on Wall Street, rising to the youngest senior vice president at D.E. Shaw in 1990.

Bezos left his well-paid job four years later to launch Amazon.com, an online bookshop that became one of the Internet’s most significant success stories.

Amazon

Family

On January 12, 1964, Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, a teen mother, and Ted Jorgensen, his biological father. The Jorgensens were only married for a year. Bezos’ mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who was four years old.

Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle, whom he met at D.E. Shaw, in 1993. They announced their divorce in 2019, and the National Enquirer published a report the next day stating that Bezos was having an affair with another lady.

Education

He relocated to Miami with his family, becoming valedictorian from high school. He founded the Dream Institute, his first business, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders while still in high school.

Bezos showed an early curiosity by converting his parents’ garage into a laboratory and wiring electrical contraptions about his home.

He developed his interest in computers and went to Princeton University to study computer science and electrical engineering. In 1986, Bezos received a summa cum laude degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked for several Wall Street firms, including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and D.E. Shaw. Bezos became the vice president at D.E. Shaw in 1990.

Bezos chose to take a bold step into the embryonic realm of e-commerce, even though his career in banking was incredibly lucrative. In 1994, he quit his job, went to Seattle, and opened an online bookstore to capitalize on the unrealized potential of the Internet industry.

Amazon

Bezos is likely best recognized for being the founder and former CEO of the Internet behemoth Amazon. He is still the company’s executive chairman. On July 16, 1995, Bezos launched Amazon.com, named after a meandering South American river, after asking 300 friends to test his site.

Amazon is an Internet-based company that sells clothes, books, music, movies, housewares, electronics, toys, and other items. It provides service directly or as an intermediary between different shops and Amazon.com’s millions of customers.

In addition, its Web services division rents out data storage and processing power over the Internet, a practice known as “cloud computing.” The company’s headquarters are located in Seattle, Washington.

The company’s first success was phenomenal. It sold books across the US and 45 other countries in 30 days with no press advertising. Sales hit crossed $20,000 a week in two months, far quicker than Bezos and his startup team had anticipated.

Amazon went public in May 1997 and was one of the few dot-com companies to escape the crash. Annual sales soared from $511,000 in 1995 to $3 billion in 2001 as the platform expanded its product offerings and established itself as an industry leader and pioneer. 1314 Amazon Prime Air, which would employ drones to carry packages to consumers, was announced by Bezos in 2013 as part of the company’s groundbreaking Amazon Prime subscription service.

With the sale of CDs and movies in 1998 and later apparel, electronics, toys, and more through significant retail partnerships, Bezos began to diversify Amazon’s products.

As a result, in the early 1990s, while many dot-coms failed, Amazon thrived, increasing annual revenues from $510,000 in 1995 to $17 billion in 2011.

Bezos announced in his 2018 annual shareholder letter that the firm had reached 100 million paid Amazon Prime customers. By September 2018, Amazon has surpassed $1 trillion in market capitalization, becoming the second corporation to do so, just a week after Apple.

At the end of 2018, Amazon stated that it would raise its minimum pay to $15 per hour for its employees. However, workers protested during Prime Day in July 2019, expressing their dissatisfaction with its working conditions and rigorous pace.

Other Companies

Aside from Amazon, Bezos launched Blue Origin, a spaceflight firm, in 2000. Soon after, Blue Origin purchased a launch site in Texas and announced plans to launch the New Shepard crewed suborbital spacecraft in 2018 and the New Glenn orbital launch vehicle in 2020.

In 2013, Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post and its related properties. 17 After a few years, its audience and traffic exploded, and in October 2015, it surpassed The New York Times for the very first time in the United States in terms of unique web visitors. Bezos’ net worth was estimated to be $112 billion in 2018, making him the world’s wealthiest person.

Amazon Studios and Amazon Instant Video

Amazon.com performed its video-on-demand service in 2006. It was formerly known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo before being renamed Amazon Instant Video.

With the opening of Amazon Studios in 2013, Bezos debuted several original programming. The company’s first original feature film, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, was created and released in 2015. Bezos stood in front of the camera in 2016 for a cameo role as an alien in Star Trek Beyond. Bezos was a Star Trek fan since childhood. Hee is described as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb,

According to The Seattle Times, Amazon streamlined its consumer retail operations in early 2018 to focus on expanding sectors such as digital entertainment and Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant.

E-Reader Kindle

In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle, a portable digital book reader that allowed customers to buy, download, read, and keep their favorite books on the list.

With the launch of the Kindle Fire, he also launched Amazon into the tablet industry in 2011. He found the new Kindle Fire HD the following September, the company’s next-generation tablet geared to compete with Apple’s iPad.

Drones from Amazon

In early December 2013, Bezos made waves when he announced “Amazon Prime Air,” an experimental program by Amazon that uses drones to deliver packages to consumers.

He said that Those drones would be able to carry up to five pounds of cargo and travel within a 10-mile radius of the company’s distribution center. On December 7, 2016, the first Prime Air delivery was conducted in Cambridge, England.

Food

Bezos had been eyeing the food delivery business, and Amazon revealed in 2017 that it had purchased Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in cash. As a result, Amazon Prime customers may now get in-store promotions and grocery delivery in two hours, depending on the market. As a result, Walmart and Kroger started delivering meals to their customers.

Stock price

Amazon’s stock price reflects the company’s incredible expansion. From 2016 to 2021, the stock climbed by more than 450 percent and more than 75 percent from January 2020 to January 2021. 19 As of 2021, Bezos owns around 11% of Amazon, making it his primary source of wealth. 20 As part of his divorce procedures, Bezos sold over a million shares and gave additional shares to his now-ex-wife from 2017 to 2019.

As a result, Bezos owns more than 70 million shares of the corporation, according to the company’s 2021 annual meeting statement.

Real Estate

Bezos also has significant investments in more traditional assets like real estate. For example, his 165,000-acre Corn Ranch in Texas was purchased as the headquarters for his aerospace business, Blue Origin, and the test location for the New Shepard vertical-landing crewed suborbital rocket.

His personal property portfolio comprises properties on both the East and West Coasts. In addition, Bezos owns two multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills mansions and a 10,000-square-foot apartment in Manhattan’s Century Tower for just under $10 million.

Century Tower property values have reportedly risen even higher due to Bezos’ presence in New York, with space selling of $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot. He also has a lakefront home in Washington state, where he paid $28 million to expand the living area to about 30,000 square feet.

Amazon paid $1.5 billion for its own South Lake Union headquarters building in Seattle in 2012, making it one of the city’s top commercial property owners.

Amazon purchased roughly a dozen structures, totaling nearly 2 million square feet of office space and 100,000 square feet of retail space. The Seattle Times stated in August 2017 that Amazon had the same amount of office space as Seattle’s following 40 largest businesses combined.

Investments

Bezos became an early investor in Google in 1998. His $250,000 investment would be worth billions now, even though he hasn’t stated how much of the stock he holds since its initial public offering in 2004.

Bezos maintains a website called BezosExpeditions.com that lists over 30 of his most significant investments, ventures, and charity endeavors. Bezos’ investments aren’t centered on just one or two industries or even market sectors; instead, they represent a wide-ranging exploration of various business areas and ideas, including cloud computing, robotics, biotechnology, and even hand-blown glass.

Technology

Bezos is drawn to the technology industry, media and communication services that help people interact, and what he sees as potentially successful ventures.

Bezos has invested in Twitter Inc. and the popular business news website Business Insider in the media and communications sector. Bezos has invested in two platforms for connecting people: Zocdoc Inc. and Nextdoor. 529

Bezos has invested more than $30 million in Uber, a transportation company. Amazon’s massive effort into delivering cloud computing services demonstrates Bezos’ belief in the cloud. 4

His investment interests, however, do not stop with his own company. Workday Inc., a firm that delivers cloud-based human resource services, is one of its most significant investment triumphs.

The company went public shortly after Bezos’ venture capital investment, raising more than $684 million in an initial public offering (IPO). 30

31 Bezos has also invested in Glassybaby, a firm that creates glass-blown votive candle holders, in the realm of more traditional retail. 32

Charity

Over the years, Bezos has made numerous significant charitable donations, including financing several education projects through the Bezos Family Foundation.

Every year, he invests $1 billion in his space exploration company, Blue Origin. Bezos and three other people boarded the New Shepard spaceship on July 20, 2021, to accomplish Blue Origin’s first successful crewed trip.

Bezos has given individual multimillion-dollar charitable contributions to Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry and his alma mater, Princeton University, through the Bezos Family Foundation, finances many education projects.

In addition, Bezos and his now-ex-wife, MacKenzie, announced a $33 million commitment to TheDream.US in January 2018, a nonprofit that works to increase college access for undocumented immigrant youngsters brought to the US as children.

The award will provide college scholarships to 1,000 deferred actions for childhood arrivals (DACA) recipients in the United States.

Conclusion

He got his first significant accolade when Time named Bezos Person of the Year in 1999. He became one of America’s most influential leaders by U.S. News & World Report in 2008.

In 2008, Carnegie Mellon University bestowed upon Bezos an honorary doctorate in science and technology. He is one of the world’s affluent persons because of his successful business operations.

Read More Elon Musk: Tesla CEO’s Inspiring Success Story

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