Jeff Bezos’s name is everywhere, and he and Elon Musk have competed for the title of world’s richest individual for the last several years. But the race is not as close as it used to be as Bezos has a current net worth of 151.8 billion.
The Princeton grad majored in electrical engineering and computer science and worked on Wall Street in the early 1990s. In 1994, he founded Amazon, and the rest is history.
The multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, started selling books online, but now sells a lot more than just books. With a focus on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence, Amazon has become the largest online sales company in the world and has grown even more since adding cloud services and virtual assistants to the mix.
Bezos also founded an aerospace company called Blue Origin, which hopes to launch a new era of commercial human space flight. He also owns numerous investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions.
Those investments include The Washington Post newspaper, the 10,000 Year Clock project and Bezos One Day Fund, a $2 billion philanthropic fund which he launched with his then-wife MacKenzie Scott in 2018 that helps address homelessness and early education in low-income communities.
In 2020, Bezos became the first person to reach a net worth of $200 billion. He remains one of the few people in the exclusive centibillionaire club with a net worth over $100 billion, but he has steep competition. In addition to the infamous Elon Musk, there are a few other centibillionaires vying for the top spot. The next richest people are Bernard Arnault with $146.6 billion, and Bill Gates coming in fourth with $129 billion.
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