On Thursday, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos overtook Microsoft co-founder and previous wealthiest person Bill Gates. His “Everything Store” now generates almost $136 billion in annual sales. Learn more about the background of one of the world’s wealthiest men and his rise to prominence in the hedge fund industry. If you are still wondering who’s Jeff Bezos, then continue reading.
Early Life and Career
Bezos founded the Dream Institute in high school to encourage young people to think creatively. When he graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a summa cum laude in electrical engineering and computer science, he worked in various capacities before joining the New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1990. Bezos quickly rose through the ranks, becoming the company’s youngest senior vice president with responsibility for investigating the Internet’s potential as an investment vehicle. The staggering growth of the Internet at over 2,000% every year ignited his entrepreneurial spirit. The man left his job at D.E. Shaw in 1994 and settled in Seattle, Washington, where he opened an online bookstore. Bezos started building the site’s software in his garage with a small team.
It was in 1999 that Bezos expanded the site to include auctions and began funding other online retailers. As a result of Amazon’s popularity, several other companies, including major book publishers, have launched their own online stores.
To remain competitive as more and more businesses fought for customers’ attention online, Bezos wisely diversified Amazon’s product offerings in 2005. To expand its diversification, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, a cloud-computing business that would become the largest of its kind in the world.
Personal Life
During his time at D.E. Shaw, Bezos met his future wife, Mackenzie Tuttle, and the two were married in 1993. After Bezos’s wife announced their divorce in January 2019, the National Enquirer published a report detailing his extramarital affair the following day. Bezos soon began looking into how the tabloid obtained his personal text messages. Then, in February, he published a lengthy essay online in which he accused executives at American Media Inc. (AMI), the Enquirer’s parent company, of “extortion and bribery” for threatening to publish nude photos of Bezos if he did not cease his investigation and comply with other demands.
Salary
Bezos’s annual pay will stay at $81,840 through 2021. Beyond his base salary, he has other sources of income totaling $1.6 million. Therefore, Bezos earns roughly $1,681,840 per year. You might not grasp the magnitude of his annual income just by glancing at it.
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