Jeff Bezos Net Worth

What is Jeff Bezos’ net worth? If you have this question in your mind, then you’ve come to the right place. 

Net Worth	$191.85 Billion
Known for	Amazon, Blue Origin
Position	Founder, President & CEO: Amazon
Country	United States
Age	60
Last Updated	2022

Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, the biggest e-commerce company in the world. He started Amazon in 1994, as an online book store but it has now grown to become one of the biggest companies in the world. This growth helped him achieve the title of richest person in the world, and even after his divorce with MacKenzie Bezos, (he lost about $36 Billion in the divorce) he currently ranks no. 2 in the list of Richest people in the world. As of 2022 Jeff Bezos’ net worth is estimated to be about $191.85 Billion.

Jeff Bezos’ early life and education

Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mom divorced in Bezos’ early childhood, but later married Miguel Bezos. After that, his family moved to Houston, Texas when Miguel got a job as an engineer at Exxon. 

Jeff Bezos’ maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He had retired early to his family ranch near Cotulla, Texas where young Jeff spent most of his summers.

Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary school till 6th grade and Miami Palmetto High School thereafter. In 1986, he graduated from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

Career

With such a good performance in College Jeff Bezos was offered job positions at Intel, Bell Labs, and other big companies, but he refused and instead joined a fin-tech telecommunications startup called Fitel. A few years later he switched to the banking industry and later joined a newly founded Hedge fund called D. E. Shaw & Co. While working there he realized that the usage of the internet was growing very rapidly. 

To tap into the growing numbers of Internet users Jeff visualised a business plan that made sense. He created a list of 20 different items to sell online. Out of all the items on his list, ‘books’ had the largest number of items. So, he decided that it was the best thing to sell online first. Then, later he expanded and started selling other things as well.

Founding Amazon

Young Jeff was an inventor, or should we say, a garage inventor. Most of his inventions were made out of general household materials. Selling books online was one of his ideas. An idea, inspired by the passion to create something that couldn’t exist in the physical form. A library or a book store can’t house all the books in the world, but an online platform theoretically can. The sheer number of books in existence made Bezos choose Books as the first choice for his online store.

The Business plan was laid out in a cross country roadtrip from New York to Seattle, and with $300,000 funding from his parents, Bezos started Amazon.com from his garage in 1994.

Some time after building a decent customer base, Jeff conducted a survey and asked his customers what they wanted them to list. To this, one customer replied, ‘I wish you sold windshield wipers because I need windshield wipers for my car’. This was when an idea struck his mind. People really want convenience and they’re even willing to pay more for it. What’s more convenient than browsing through hundreds of products right from the comfort of your home computer, and getting it delivered to your house.  

With this thought in mind, Bezos slowly expanded Amazon to include more categories of products.

E Commerce platform larger than countries

Amazon currently has about 353 Million Products listed on its website. If a product is, on average, 1 Feet wide by 1 Feet long by 0.5 feet high, it’s volume would be 0.5 Cu. Feet. Total volume required to house all products would be 176.5 Million Cu. Feet. 

Considering an average of 7 feet height of the display rack the area required to house all the products side by side without spaces for display and maneuver comes to 176.5/7 = 25.2 Million Sq. Feet. About 50% of that area would be required for people to view the items. 

When having a product on display, you’d expect to have at least 10 such items in the inventory. This would bring the area requirement to 378 Million Sq. Feet, or the size of Sint Maarten a constituent country in the Kingdom of Netherlands. Building such a store in the physical world would be impossible. 

Timeline

• Born: 1964
• Graduated and joined Fitel: 1986
• Joined Bankers Trust: 1988
• Joined D. E. Shaw & Co.: 1990
• Founded Amazon.com: 1994
• Amazon IPO: 1997
• Invested in Google: 1998
• Founded Blue Origin (A Space exploration company): 2000
• Started Amazon Web Services, and Prime Subscriptions: 2006
• Launched Kindle: 2007
• Launched Amazon Studio: 2010
• Bought Washington Post: 2013
• Became the richest person in the world: 2018
• Divorced MacKenzie Bezos: 2019

Success Lessons from Jeff Bezos

1. There’s always going to be risks – Jeff Bezos knew that the Amazon.com experiment could fail. At the same time, he also wanted to work on his ‘regret minimisation framework’, hence he decided to go ahead with his idea.

2. Build for the customer not competitor – That doen’t mean one should ignore their competitors completely. Alongside keeping a watchful eye on your competitors you should also focus on customers needs. This allows the company to create products and services that their customers adore.

3. Thinking long term – Amazon played the long game from the beginning itself and that allowed them to eradicate their competitors while also ensuring customer satisfaction. A similar approach was taken by Reliance Jio which is currently India’s largest telecom company.

He had always planned to expand to sell other products but he started with what he thought was the best thing to start with, ‘books’.

Here’s a 1997 interview video of Jeff Bezos:

Who knew that after 21 years this man would become the richest person on earth?

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