Jeff Bezos becomes world’s richest person…

Entrepreneur is now worth $141billion as he overtakes Microsoft’s Bill Gates thanks to Amazon’s growing success

• The Amazon founder is already worth $40billion more than he was just last year
• Amazon is now number 8 on the Fortune 500 list with a revenue of $177.87billion
• Bezos came up with the idea to create Amazon when he was just 30 years old
• He had a stable job at NY hedge fund but dreamed of opening online bookstore

  What started as an idea for an online bookstore has made Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world.

  The Amazon founder and CEO now has a net worth of $141.9billion, which is already $40billion more than he was worth last year.

  Bezos is now worth $49billion more than Bill Gates and $60billion more than Warren Buffet, who rank second and third.

  And as Amazon shares continue to hit record highs in the stock market, it appears Bezos’ wallet is only going to become more and more stuffed.

  It is an incredible story that all began when a 30-year-old Bezos came across a surprising fact.

  Bezos learned that internet usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. It seemed like proof that his fantasy of an online book store could become a reality.

  ‘I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast,’ he told Princeton University, his alma mater, during a 2010 commencement address.

  ‘The idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles – something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world – was very exciting to me.’

  But at the time Bezos was recently married and had a plush job as the vice president of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group in Manhattan.

  His wife MacKenzie told him to go for it, but his boss urged him to stick to stability.

  As they went on a long walk in Central Park and Bezos told him of a fantasy he had that would one day become Amazon, his boss said: ‘That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a job.’

  His boss urged Bezos to take 48 hours to think about his decision.

  The future CEO then realized how he would feel, decades into the future, if he didn’t at least try.

  ‘In most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission,’ he said at the Summit LA conference in 2017.

  ‘It’s paths not taken and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened. I knew that, when I’m 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and it failing.’

  ‘If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I’m 80 that I tried. I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn’t try.’

  So Bezos decided to take the ‘less safe path’ and follow his passion, launching Amazon in 1994.

  The company went public three years later and has only been growing since.

  This year Amazon entered the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list for the very first time, jumping four spots to eighth place with a revenue of $177.87billion.

  It ranks only behind Walmart – who took the top spot – followed by Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Unitedhealth Group, McKesson, and CVS.

  But Bezos’ success has come amid controversy surrounding the treatment and pay of his own employees.

  The median salary of the 566,000 employees at Amazon was $28,446 in 2017, according to CNN Money.

  And just days ago more than 400 employees from the Washington Post signed an open letter asking for better pay and benefits from Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013.

  The employees specifically asked for ‘fair wages, fair benefits for retirement, family leave, health care, and a fair amount of job security.’

Posted by Minority Voice on Jun 19 2018. Filed under Featured, Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry