Jeff Bezos is an American businessman, philanthropist, and space explorer with a $139 billion net worth. He made his money by starting Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos used to be the CEO of Amazon and is now the president and chairman of the board. In July 2017, he was worth more than Bill Gates for the first time. And between October 2017 and January 2021, he was the richest person in the world. But that’s just on the surface; let’s find out how he has been able to stay within the top 3 spot on the list of the richest people in the world.
Jeff Bezos Net Worth: Overview
This year has been hard for tech companies, and their founders’ wealth has taken a big hit from falling stock prices.
Forbes recently released its annual list of the world’s richest billionaires. The list showed that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, lost the most money in the last year.
Forbes says that Bezos is the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $114 billion. This is down over $57 billion from March of last year. In 2022, Amazon’s stock dropped by 50%, making it the first publicly traded company to lose $1 trillion in market value.
Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and Twitter, came in second on Forbes’ list with a net worth of $180 billion. The top spot went to Bernard Arnault, CEO of luxury goods company LVMH, who has a net worth of $211 billion.
Forbes says that this year’s list had 313 tech billionaires worth a total of $1.9 trillion. Last year’s list had 332 tech industry giants worth a total of $2.1 trillion. Forbes found 365 tech billionaires worth a record $2.5 trillion in 2021, which was a very good year for the business.
Amazon has also had a rough start to 2023 so far. Andy Jassy, who took over as CEO when Jeff Bezos left in July 2021, said in January that the company would cut 18,000 jobs, which would be the largest number of jobs lost in the company’s history. In March, Jassy said that Amazon would cut another 9,000 jobs because it wants to be a “leaner” company.
Jeff Bezos Net Worth: About Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is the world’s third-richest person, surpassing the wealth of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and legendary investor Warren Buffett. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his net worth is $139 billion as of May 2023.
Bezos is the founder, former CEO, and current executive chair of Amazon, a global e-commerce company. In 2022, the company will account for 6.5% of all retail sales in the United States and 44.9% of digital retail spending. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to rise as digitalization and the cloud computing revolution reshape human behavior.
Bezos, raised by a teen mother and a Cuban immigrant stepfather, once told his schoolteachers that “the future of mankind is not on this planet.” Jeff Bezos’ boss discouraged him from resigning from his secure job as a hedge fund executive with D. Amazon was founded in 1994 by E. Shaw & Co.
Amazon: Beyond Books
Jeff Bezos earned degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University. He turned down offers from Intel and Bell Labs to join a startup called Fitel after graduating. He co-founded a news-by-fax service company with Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET, which failed, prompting Bezos to become the hedge fund’s youngest senior vice president. E. Shaw.
In 1994, Bezos was enthralled by the fact that the Internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% per year, and the idea for Amazon was born.
With a $10,000 investment, he founded Amazon.com, a book-selling platform. Most meetings were held at the local Barnes & Noble by Bezos, his wife, and two programmers. Amazon began selling books in every state in the United States and 45 countries in July 1995.
Exceeding Expectations
Bezos attempted to raise capital by estimating $74 million in sales by 2000, far less than the actual figure of $1.64 billion in sales in 1999.
Following investments from his family, he raised $1 million in seed funding from angel investors.
The first 20 investors in Amazon with a $50,000 stake rounded to 1% would be worth $3.5 billion after 20 years, representing a 70-times return.
Amazon raised another $8 million in Series A funding from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in June 1996.
Amazon went public in May 1997, making it one of the few dot-com companies to survive the dot-com bust.
Annual sales grew from $511,000 in 1995 to more than $3 billion in 2001.
Amazon’s stock price reflects the company’s phenomenal growth. The stock increased by about 450% between January 2016 and January 2021, and by 60% between January 2020 and January 2021.
As of 2022, Bezos owns 12.7% of Amazon, making it a source of his wealth. According to the company’s 2022 annual meeting announcement, Bezos owns more than 64.5 million shares.
Real Estate
Jeff Bezos has investments in traditional assets such as real estate. His 165,000-acre Corn Ranch in Texas was purchased as the headquarters for his aerospace company, Blue Origin, and now serves as the test site for the vertical-landing, manned, suborbital New Shepard rocket.
His properties include multimillion-dollar holdings in Beverly Hills and Manhattan on the East and West Coasts. Bezos’ presence in New York is said to have increased Century Tower property values, with space selling for $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot. He also owns a lakefront home in Washington state, where he spent $28 million to expand the living space to nearly 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 largest commercial property owners. Amazon acquired nearly a dozen buildings, nearly 2 million square feet of office space, and roughly 100,000 square feet of retail space.
The Seattle Times reported in August 2017 that Amazon had more office space than the region’s 40 largest employers combined, at 8.1 million square feet.
Charity Donations
Jeff Bezos has made significant charitable contributions. Bezos has made multimillion-dollar charitable contributions to Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry and his alma mater, Princeton University, in addition to funding several education projects through the Bezos Family Foundation.
Bezos and his now ex-wife, MacKenzie, pledged $33 million to TheDream.US, an organization that works to improve college access for undocumented immigrant youth brought to the United States as children, in January 2018. The grant provides college scholarships to 1,000 high school graduates in the United States who have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status.
Media, Technology, Glass, and Travel
Bezos is passionate about technology and media and communication services that connect people. He invested in Twitter Inc. and Business Insider, a popular business news website. Bezos became an early investor in Google in 1998. While he hasn’t disclosed how much stock he owns since the company’s initial public offering in 2004, his $250,000 investment is likely worth billions today.
Bezos has also invested in people-connection platforms Zocdoc Inc. and Nextdoor.
Jeff Bezos has invested over $30 million in Uber, a transportation company.
Workday Inc., which provides cloud-based human resource services, is one of his notable investment successes. Shortly after Bezos’ venture capital investment in the company, it went public in an IPO that raised more than $684 million.
Bezos has also invested in glassybaby, which makes glass-blown votive candle holders.
Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post in August 2013. Its audience and traffic exploded, and in October 2015, it surpassed The New York Times for the first time in terms of U.S. unique web viewers.
Innovative Concepts
Bezos revealed in 2013 that the company’s revolutionary Amazon Prime subscription business would use drones to deliver packages to customers.
Amazon Prime Air drone deliveries began in limited areas in 2022, with plans for future expansion.
Bezo invested in the 10,000-year clock project, which aims to embed a clock into the Sierra Diablo mountain range in Texas and keep it ticking for 10,000 years. The clock will include a chime generator that will produce a different chime sound every day. Bezos explained the clock’s importance by stating that today’s global problems necessitate “long-term thinking.”
The F-1 engine retrieval project recovered engines from the Atlantic Ocean that powered the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Artifacts were recovered and displayed from two F-1 engines. In 2015, the artifacts were donated to The Museum of Flight in Seattle.
With his growing fortune, Bezos realized his childhood ambition of becoming a space entrepreneur.
Every year, Bezos invests $1 billion in Blue Origin, his space exploration company, which became one of the first commercial companies to launch a reusable rocket in 2016.
On July 18, 2018, Blue Origin launched the New Shepard spacecraft into orbit to test its safety systems, which were successful.
Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen boarded the New Shepard on July 20, 2021, and completed Blue Origin’s first successful crewed flight, reaching an altitude of just over 62 miles before safely landing.
Jeff Bezos Net Worth
Jeff Bezos is a $139 billion dollar American philanthropist, businessman, and space explorer. As the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos amassed a fortune. Jeff Bezos is Amazon’s former CEO and current president and chairman of the board. In July 2017, he surpassed Bill Gates in terms of wealth for the first time. Between October 2017 and January 2021, he was the world’s richest person without a break.
According to Amazon’s most recent SEC filing, Jeff owns 55 million shares of the company, or approximately 12% of the total shares outstanding. At one point, he owned 80 million Amazon shares. Jeff transferred 19.7 million shares to his ex-wife as part of his divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos in April 2019. The shares were worth $36 billion at the time of the transfer. Jeff’s net worth was temporarily reduced from $150 billion to $114 billion as a result of the settlement. Jeff was also an early pre-IPO investor in Google.com and now owns at least $1 billion in Alphabet Inc.
For much of the 2000s, Jeff was not even in the top 10 or top 20 of the world’s wealthiest people. In late 2014, Amazon’s stock began to skyrocket. Jeff’s net worth was $50 billion in July 2015. In less than two years, his net worth (and stock) had more than doubled. On July 27, 2017, Bezos surpassed Bill Gates as the world’s richest person. Amazon’s market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion in September 2018. He still owned 80 million shares prior to his divorce. Jeff’s net worth surpassed the then-all-time high of $170 billion at that time.
Was Jeff Bezos Ever the Wealthiest Person in History?
When Jeff’s peak net worth of $200 billion is compared to our list of the richest people in history after adjusting for inflation, he does not even make the top ten. Using the $200 billion figure, that would be the 11th largest fortune ever amassed by a single person (after accounting for inflation). In comparison, when oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller died, he was worth $340 billion after inflation.
Jeff Bezos Net Worth: Early Years
Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 12, 1964. Jeff’s mother was a 17-year-old high school student when he was born. His father ran a bicycle shop. Jeff’s birth mother eventually divorced his birth father. She married a Cuban immigrant named Miguel Bezos when he was four years old. Miguel adopted Jeff soon after the wedding, and Jeff’s surname was legally changed from Jorgenson to Bezos. Mike got a job as an engineer for Exxon in Houston, so the family relocated. They were also near his mother’s parents’ cattle ranch south of San Antonio. His maternal grandmother, Mattie Louise Gise, was George Strait’s first cousin.
Bezos used his parents’ garage as a laboratory for his science projects as a child in Texas. He also spent his summers working on his grandparents’ ranch. Jeff would later claim that his work ethic was formed during his summers at the ranch. He would later buy the ranch and increase its size from 25,000 to 300,000 acres.
Around the time Jeff started high school, the family relocated to Miami. Jeff worked as a short order cook at McDonald’s while in high school. He was the valedictorian of his high school and a National Merit Scholar. In his valedictorian speech, he mentioned a dream that humans would one day colonize space.
He went to Princeton University intending to study physics, but his interest in computers led him to change his major. Jeff eventually graduated with a 4.2 GPA and Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and electrical engineering.
Jeff went to work for Fitel, a financial technology firm, after graduating from college. He then moved into the banking industry, landing a product management position at Bankers Trust. He was hired as a financial analyst for D. in 1990. E. Shaw & Co., a newly launched hedge fund that believed mathematical modeling could predict large market gains.
Jeff was employed by D.E. Shaw held the position of fourth senior vice president at the company until 1994. He was thirty years old.
Amazon
Jeff had become fascinated with the nascent internet a year before. He wanted to sell something online and settled on books. During a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, Bezos developed Amazon’s business plan. He officially established the company in 1994, starting it in his garage.
Other Achievements
Bezos was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, and he received an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company, in 2000, partly due to his fascination with space travel.
Blue Origin’s early interest in developing space hotels, amusement parks, colonies, and small cities for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth is reflected in the company’s name. The company was kept secret for a few years before becoming public in 2006, after purchasing a large tract of land in west Texas for a launch and testing facility. Bezos met with Richard Branson, the multibillionaire founder of Virgin Group, in 2013 to discuss commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies; that same year, he also purchased The Washington Post.
Who Is the Brother of Jeff Bezos?
Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which he purchased for $250 million in 2013. He also has Blue Origin, an aerospace company he founded in 2000. According to the Blue Origin website, Bezos envisions a future in which “millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.” He believes that in order to preserve the earth, humans must find new energy and material resources, as well as relocate industries that cause significant stress to the planet to space.
Blue Origin is working to develop reusable launch vehicles in order to reduce the cost of space travel. Bezos was aboard Blue Origin’s first passenger flight to space on the New Shepard rocket in July 2021, which was a 10-minute flight. Bezos has stated that the company has sold nearly $100 million in future flight tickets so far. According to MarketWatch, Bezos invests roughly $1 billion per year in Blue Origin.
The 10,000-Year Clock is another project that Bezos has completed. Bezos is working on a $42 million clock in Texas that, according to the 1,000-Year Clock website, is “a special clock designed to be a symbol, an icon for long term thinking.” The clock will tick once a year, the century hand will move every 100 years, and the millennium will feature a cuckoo sound.
What Businesses Does Jeff Bezos Own?
Bezos owns The Washington Post as well as the space exploration company Blue Origin, in addition to Amazon.
What Are the Companies in Jeff Bezos’ Stock Portfolio?
Bezos has invested in Twitter Inc. (now X Corp), Uber, Airbnb, and Business Insider in addition to his 12.7% stake in Amazon.
In Conclusion
Jeff Bezos lost the title of richest man on Earth in 2021, but he still ranks third in 2023. Only Bernard Arnault of France and Elon Musk are wealthier than Bezos.
Bezos is the founder and former CEO of Amazon, and he still serves as its executive chairman.
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Jeff Bezos Net Worth: References
