Jeff Bezos, with an estimated net worth of $90.2 billion, has become the richest person in the world. Bezos is followed by fellow American Bill Gates in second place, Warren Buffett in third place, and Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega in fourth place.
Bezos owned 83.9 million shares of Amazon stock.
via Bloomberg:
A surge in Amazon.com Inc. shares Thursday morning in advance of the online retailer’s earnings report has propelled founder Jeff Bezos past Bill Gates as the world’s richest person.
Shares of the online retailer rose 1.8 percent to $1,071.31 as of 9:30 a.m. in New York. If the gains hold through the close, Bezos, 53, could leapfrog Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 61-year-old Microsoft Corp. co-founder has held the top spot since May 2013.
Jeff Bezos Net Worth: How Much Is Amazon CEO Worth Right Now?
Jeff Bezos, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix, currently has a net worth of $90.2 billion.
Early Life
Bezos was born as Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen.
Bezos graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He also served as the president of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.
Business Career
Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle where he wrote up the Amazon business plan on the way
Like most great start-ups he initially set up the company in his garage. Bezos left his well-paying job at a New York City hedge fund after learning “about the rapid growth in Internet use,” which coincided with a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling that exempted mail order companies from collecting sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence.
Amazon famously began as a book company but has since expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world’s largest Internet sales company, as well as the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services, through its Amazon Web Services arm.
In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than one million shares of his holdings in the company for $671 million, making it the largest amount of money he had ever raised in a sale of his Amazon holdings.
In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company. In 2013, Bezos discussed commercial spaceflight opportunities and strategies with Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group and chairman of Virgin Galactic.
Amazon Earns The Right To Stream Thursday Night Football For 2017 Season
