Hisham Sarwar
The CEO and founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos who is the wealthiest person in the world, is now richer then he was ever before. Bezos became the richest person in the world earlier this year and helped made Amazon the second most valuable company in the world behind Apple. His net worth today is staggering $112 billion but his success can be traced back to the risk that he took when he was 30 years ago because of his vision, positive habits.
Being a straight-A high school student, he got accepted through early admission to Princeton and majored in computer science and electrical engineering. Then he went on to work various finance and tech jobs after completing his college. In 1990s, while serving as the vice president at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, he came up with the idea to sell books on the internet. Although at that time, it meant taking a significant risk and sacrificing his stable job but he preferred to move on.
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As Bezos saw the web usage at 2,300 per cent per year, he came up with the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles. This was something that could not possibly exist in the physical world so he thought why not seize the opportunity. After a lot of soul-searching, Bezos decided to quit his job and began his dream company in 1994 and the decision actually paid off: three years later Amazon went public. The website Amazon cracked the top ten of the Fortune 500 list for the first time in history on May 21.
He then went on to start a privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company known as Blue Origin. The bubble busted and Bezos had to see his fortune tumbling to just $2 billion. He still managed to end the year on the upside and late 2001, Amazon turned a profit for the first time. After fully recovering from the setback, Bezos launched the Amazon Prime with recovering his net worth.
In 2002, Amazon made its debut at No. 492 on the Fortune 500 list which was the same year its biggest competitor Walmart first landed in the No. 1 spot. Since then Amazon gained on and early caught up with Walmart. As the dot.com bubble grew, the net worth increased to $10.1 billion which was due to 5,600 per cent increase in the Amazon stock.
He became richer than Richard Branson and Steve Jobs at $4.1 billion and transformed the ever-growing Amazon into the cloud computing by launching Amazon Web Services which today, is more profitable than the company’s retail business. The company then introduced its first Kindle ereader as well as the Amazon fresh delivery service. In 2009, Amazon bought the online show retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion in cash and stock. Bezos worth nearly doubled to $12.3 billion as the ebook sales surpassed the hardcover sales. The company although was operating at basically zero profit in 2013 but still the Amazon stick crossed the $300 mark for the first time in July. Bezos became the gained the spot for the 19th richest person in the world at $25.2 billion crossing over the Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
In June 2017, Amazon agreed to buy the Whole Foods Company for $13.7 billion and the next month he overtook Bill gates due to increase in the Amazon stock. For a few hours, he became the world’s richest person but Gates quickly regained his spot as the Amazon Stocked cooled down. But then on October 27th, the surge in the company’s share price added $10 billion to Bezos fortune in just a single day and $93.1 billion; he blew up Bill Gates once again who was at net worth $90 billion. The Monster Cyber Monday pushed Amazon stock to an even greater level that increased Bezos’s net worth beyond the trade mark of $100 billion. In the meantime, Bill gates net worth came down to $89.4 billion and Jeff Bezos is still the richest person in the world with net worth of $112 billion.
In just one year of time, Jeff Bezos added $39.2 billion to his net worth and at just the age of 54, he has a lot of opportunities to gain more. Due to the tech boom and strong stock market, more billionaires are being seen in today’s world. Jeff Bezos has gone on record with a formula for success by taking bold risks, riding the changes, and rebounding from failures and setbacks. In an interview, Bezos stated in one of his interview, that you need to be nimble and robust in order to be able to take a punch. It is important that you are quick and innovative and be willing to experiment at a higher speed.
This is the only defense that you can use against the future because you always have to be leaning into the future. The future is going to win every time if you lean away from it.
