Every time we place an order with Amazon, we increase the fortune of the company with the most current value in the market and, incidentally, its creator and CEO, CEO Jeff Bezos . For the first time in its history, the American e-commerce company has outperformed Microsoft, Apple, Google and other giants of the global private economy. Amazon’s current market value is $ 797 billion and Bezos’s fortune is estimated at $ 135 billion, according to Bloomberg, although some sources exceed that number.
This businessman earns in just one minute what an average Spaniard in more than three years . And it is not because of his salary –82,000 dollars per year–, but because he is the owner of 16% of the company’s shares. In fact, this entrepreneur born in Albuquerque (New Mexico) in 1964 is, at 55, the richest man in the world since 2017, according to the Forbes list. Currently, he continues to be in the first place and his fortune is estimated to be around an approximate figure of 150,000 million dollars.
Amazon’s adventure, like that of other technology giants such as Apple or Microsoft, also began in a garage , in this case in Seattle. Bezos had studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, graduating in 1986 and then trying to make his way on Wall Street , until he decided to go on the adventure on his own. Bezos’s initial idea, back in 1994, was to create a company to sell second-hand books, which he called Cadabra .
He started the company with an initial investment of $ 1,300,000, in part thanks to money his parents invested. Once the company was up and running, Bezos decided to rename it Amazon . The change of identity, inspired by the Amazon River, to the largest in the world, had a lot to do with an intelligent positioning strategy, since at that time the lists of web pages were disseminated in alphabetical order, with which very soon Amazon began to appear in search engine searches in the top positions. In just three years it was already listed on the stock market, reached a market value of 54 million dollars and made its then young – just thirty – founder rich.
Since then, it has not stopped growing and its focus is not only on internet commerce. Amazon has bought a chain of food sales (Whole Foods Market) , warehouses and technology networks, produces television series, has rights to broadcast sports events and stores data in the cloud.
