Since 2018, Bezos has firmly ranked first in the Forbes ranking. The company he founded has been a leader in e-commerce for many years, generating billions of dollars in revenue. According to the businessman himself, his overwhelming success was led by the fact that he always put clients in first place and did everything to make it convenient for them to use the services of his company. The ability to catch current trends also helped – Amazon often turns out to be one step ahead of competitors.
Amazon Online Store
Jeff Bezos analyzed the work and range of leading mail-order companies. It turned out that books were not presented in their catalogs – this list would be so voluminous that it simply would not fit in an envelope. However, there are no restrictions on the number of commodity items on the Internet, and Bezos decided to start trading with books.
He traveled to Los Angeles, where the bookseller convention was taking place at the time, and found that most publishers already had electronic catalogs of book products. All that remained was to create a single platform where buyers would find the goods they needed and place orders for items that were not in stock.
Establishing a business
Together with Jeff, his wife Mackenzie, whom he met in 1993 while working on Wall Street, worked on the creation of an online store. At first, the company was called Cadabra, then it was renamed Amazon, named after the Amazon River in South America, abounding in water and with countless branches – this is how its creators saw the image of the future online store.
After finishing the development of the site, Bezos began testing it. The entrepreneur asked 300 friends and acquaintances to check how the new resource works. The results showed that the code he wrote worked flawlessly on a variety of platforms. For a wide range of users, the Amazon online store was launched in July 1995, and the initial capital of an ambitious project amounted to $ 300 thousand. Jeff took this money from his parents, who received 6% of the company’s shares and after a few years also became billionaires.
Space exploration
Jeff Bezos has always had an interest in space travel. Amazon’s financial success allowed him to realize his dream: in 2004, the entrepreneur founded the aerospace company Blue Origin. She is developing the latest technologies for space flights, to make it possible for a person to stay outside the Earth for a long time.
The company is testing the New Shepard, a multi-deck rocket for suborbital travel, at a research campus near Seattle and a private rocket launcher in West Texas. Bezos hopes the spacecraft will allow experiments in gravity and usher in an era of space tourism.
The richest man on the planet
In the first months of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic shook the global economy, demand for Amazon’s online services skyrocketed, and with it the company’s stock value. By August of that year, Bezos’s fortune was estimated at more than $ 200 billion, making him the richest man in history. At the height of his success, he announced his decision to step down as Amazon CEO in the summer of 2021.
In 1999, Time magazine named Jeff Bezos the person of the year, and in 2012, Fortune magazine named the businessman of the year. The entrepreneur has been at the top of the Forbes list for a long time – at the moment, his capital is $ 183.9 billion. In early 2021, the businessman lost the leadership to Elon Musk but soon returned to his previous position.
Bezos is involved in charity work: in 2018 he founded a foundation for the homeless, and in 2020 – the environmental foundation Bezos Earth Fund. At the expense of the latter, the businessman intends to contribute $ 10 billion, the funds will be directed to work to prevent climate change. In addition, Bezos has repeatedly donated large sums of money to research related to the fight against cancer. The billionaire says, “Giving out money takes as much attention as building a successful company.”
In 2019, the Bezos couple divorced after 25 years of marriage – Mackenzie received a 4% stake in Amazon, which corresponds to $ 38.3 billion. The former spouses have four children: three sons and a Chinese adopted daughter.
