Bezos is the founder and largest shareholder of Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer. The Seattle-based company operates retail websites Zappos and Audible, serves as a platform for third-party vendors, and provides cloud computing services. Publicly traded Amazon had revenue of $136 billion in 2016.
Jeff Bezos's net worth of $121B can buy ...
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Bezos owns 16 percent of Amazon, the world's largest online retailer. His stake is disclosed in a February 2018 SEC filing.
He's sole owner of space exploration company Blue Origin, which is included at a calculation of investment cost. The implied value places it between the $1 billion valuation Richard Branson received for Virgin Galactic in 2009 and the $21 billion valuation Elon Musk's SpaceX saw in a 2017 funding round. Blue Origin aims to reduce launch costs, put millions of people to work in space and eventually move industrial and manufacturing industries off the planet.
Determining a valuation for Blue Origin is difficult because of its nascent stage, the lack of details surrounding its strategy and the fact that Bezos is sole shareholder with no apparent intent to sell, according to Chad Anderson, CEO of venture fund Space Angels. A Blue Origin director said at a 2014 space conference in Washington that the billionaire had invested "at least $500 million," which is accounted for in equal amounts over 13 years beginning in 2001, the year Blue Origin was incorporated.
Bezos said in April 2017 that he funds the enterprise through the sale of "about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock." After-tax proceeds from known share sales from 2015 to 2017 are deducted from his cash balance and categorized as funding for Blue Origin. He's collected $7 billion selling Amazon shares, based on an analysis of Bloomberg data.
Bezos paid $250 million for the Washington Post in August 2013, which is deducted from cash and included at cost. His 3 percent stake in Business Insider is derived from the price Axel Springer paid to acquire 88 percent of the news site in September 2015. He also owns 2 percent of Aimmune Therapeutics, according to a 2016 stock exchange filing.
The value of his cash investments includes these transactions, taxes and market performance.
Drew Herdner, a spokesman for Amazon, declined to comment on Bezos's net worth.
Jeff Bezos is a former Wall Street computer engineer who created Amazon in 1994 to sell books online. After an initial public offering in 1997, Amazon stock shot up almost 40-fold, sending Bezos's personal fortune above $12 billion. By the time the technology bubble had finished deflating in 2001, his shares were valued at less than $2 billion.
The Princeton graduate built his reputation on long-term thinking and focusing on customer service. Today, Amazon sells millions of different products, many of which are purveyed by third-party vendors that rely on Amazon's data management services to help fulfill their orders.
The company introduced the Kindle electronic book reader in 2007. It's now Amazon's biggest-selling item. Four years later, Amazon released the Kindle Fire, putting the company in competition with Apple in the tablet computer business.
Bezos owns the Washington Post and also oversees Blue Origin, a space exploration company that seeks to lower the cost and increase the safety of spaceflight.