World’s Richest Man And How He Made It, Toppling Gates, Buffet

What is being celebrated of this man could be traced to a risk he took when he was thirty, according to CNBC report.

After high school, he majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and then went on to work various finance and tech jobs after college.

Bezos later became vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw in the 1990s and came up with the idea to sell books over the Internet.

“I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year,” Bezos once said; “I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and 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.”

At the 2017 Summit LA conference, Bezos recalled that, when he told his boss about his Internet bookstore idea, his boss said, “I think this is a good idea, but I think this would be an even better idea for somebody that didn’t already have a good job.”

That’s when Bezos considered what his 80-year-old self would say if he didn’t seize this opportunity.

“In most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission. It’s paths not taken and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened,” Bezos said at Summit LA. “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.”

After “a lot of soul-searching,” Bezos quit his job to start his dream company in 1994 and the decision paid off: Amazon went public three years later.

For the first time in history, Amazon cracked the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list on May 21, alongside corporate behemoths Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Exxon Mobil and, of course, Walmart.

…with wife, MacKenzie S. Bezos

With revenue of $177.87 billion, as of the company’s 2017 fourth-quarter earnings report, Amazon placed eighth on this year’s list of America’s largest companies. That’s up four spots from its rank last year as No. 12.

Amazon made its debut at No. 492 on the Fortune 500 back in 2002, the same year its biggest competitor Walmart first landed in the No. 1 spot. Amazon has since quickly gained on, and nearly caught up with, Walmart.

Bezos has such a proven track record for shaking up the business sectors he enters that he has been dubbed “disruptor-in-chief”.

Like his company, Bezos has also transformed with time, shaving his head and bulking up his body with exercise. The results were immortalised in a series of photos taken at a conference last year.

And, he seems to be growing more comfortable being in the public eye, according to recent portrait piece in The New York Times.

A fan of science fiction and in particular the British author Iain Banks, Bezos has passions other than Amazon.

Bezos called Banks “a huge personal favourite” in a tweet last month while announcing that Amazon Prime video service was working on a television series based on one of the author’s novels.

Bezos has invested some US$42 million in building a 150-metre-tall clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Built inside a mountain in Texas, the clock will be powered by geothermal energy.

“Humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilisation-scale problems,” Bezos says in a blog post devoted to the clock project. “We’re likely to need more long-term thinking.”

Bezos is also behind private space exploration operation Blue Origin, into which he usually invests money from selling Amazon shares.

Amazon CEO Jeff and wife MacKenzie Bezos arrive at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Photo: Reuters

Blue Origin has outlined plans to build a spaceship and lunar lander capable of delivering cargo to the moon, perhaps to support colonies there.

With the purchase of The Washington Post in 2013, the internet entrepreneur added a prestigious news operation to his investments.

The Post, and Bezos himself, have been targeted by US President Donald Trump. An open critic of Trump, Bezos has jokingly offered to send him into space.

Bezos has been married to writer Mackenzie, since 1993. They have four children.