The richest person on earth right now, Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com and owner of ‘The Washington Post.’ has made his business ventures successful
Born on 12th January 1964 in New Mexico, he has always been fond of computers.
As a child, he was always interested in how things worked. He turned his parents’ garage into a laboratory. Afterwards, he moved to Miami with his family and eventually developed a love for computers. During high school, he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp where he trained fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Afterwards, Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated in computer science and electrical engineering.
After his graduation, he went to work on Wall Street. He started working at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. It is the place where he found his future wife, MacKenzie Tuttle.
In 1990 he became the youngest senior vice president at D.E. Shaw, an investment firm. Bezos and MacKenzie Tuttle got married in 1993 and had 4 kids, three sons and a daughter adopted from China, before getting divorced in 2019.
Even though Bezos had a great earning job in finance, he chose to take the risky move of setting up an e-commerce company. In 1994, he got obsessed with his lucrative job, & quit it to open his own business.
Initially, he opened up a small office for his company in his garage where he along with his few employees began developing software. Soon, the business turned to grow and they expanded their office into a 2-bedroom house. They equipped their workplace with 3 Sun Micro-stations to convert it into a test site and invited 300 friends to test their beta site. After, successful amendments, he opened Amazon.com on July 16, 1995. An online bookstore that became one of the Internet’s biggest success stories. In 2013. It is named after the famous South American river, Amazon.
Bezos purchased The Washington Post in a $250 million deal.
The website grew faster than the expectations of Bezos and his startup team. It sold books across the world in more than 45 countries, including the USA within 30 days of its inception. The 60 days, they were making $80,000 per month. The website became public in 1997. Hence, the competitor launched their own e-commerce websites. However, Amazon not only gave them a healthy competition but surpassed their businesses and became an e-commerce leader. And all of this without much press promotion.
After a great success of an online book store, Bezos decided to explain the business criteria by starting to sell videos and CDs in 1998. After a few years, they also began selling clothes, electronics, toys and more stuff online. It was done through major retail partnerships.
Starting from its basic annual sales of half-million dollars in 1995, Amazon had a sales revenue of $17 billion in 2011.
In 2006, Amazon.com launched its video-on-demand service by the name Amazon Unbox on TiVo. Afterwards, its name was rebranded as Amazon Instant Video.
In 2007, Amazon released the Kindle tablet, that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections. Later that year, Bezos announced that he has stakes in Blue Origin. It was an aerospace company based in Seattle engaged in developing technologies to offer space travel to paying customers.
In 2013, Bezos purchased ‘The Washington Post’ and other publications affiliated with its parent company for $250 million and made worldwide news. Bezos had a different vision about the Post and he tried to cope up with the changing news world which was affected by the internet.
In December 2013, Bezos revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon where delivery services would be done using drones. It will be called “Amazon Prime Air”. The drone service was developed with a vision to become a reality in 4 to 5 years. The drone would be delivered within 10 miles of radius from the company’s distribution centre.
Amazon also launched the Fire phone in 2014. However, because of some missteps it failed and had to be discontinued in a year. It was criticized for being too gimmicky.
Soon, Bezos won the market again with Amazon Studios by the development of original content.
It started featuring several new programs in 2013. Few programs made the venture hit high TRP in 2014. The company produced and released its first original feature film 2015.
In 2016, Bezos appeared in a cameo role in Star Trek Beyond, playing an alien.
Net Worth
The long-life hard work, innovation and great business mind of Jeff Bezos served him well. In July 2017, Bezos briefly surpassed Bill Gates(Microsoft founder and the then richest person) to become the richest person in the world. However, at that time he could not hold the position for long because of the fluctuating stock prices but he soon became the richest person in October and in January 2018.
As per an estimation made by Bloomberg, his net worth is worth $105.1 billion, which makes him the richest person in history. Two months later, Bezos’s net worth reached $127 billion. And after some more time, his net worth became $150 billion in mid-July. Which he is holding and growing till now.
