Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com and owner of ‘The Washington Post, recently displaced Bill Gates to become the World’s, Richest Man. A 10% spike in the stock of Amazon.com within hours added $900 million to Bezos’ net worth, comfortably placing him in the No. 1 spot with a net worth of $90.6 billion versus Gates’ $90.1 billion at that time.
Here are 9 things you probably didn’t know about him:
- He became the youngest Senior Vice President of a Wall Street Investment Firm D.E. Shaw, at the age of 26, in 1990.
- As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house.
- He started his first business in High school, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.
- He abandoned an extremely lucrative job on Wall Street and took a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce.
- Bezos set up the office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began developing software.
- With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned.
- Bezos took Amazon.com public two years after it officially commenced operation in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites.
- Bezos’ Amazon.com outpaced competitors and became an e-commerce leader, two years after it went public.
- Bezos pioneered the use of drones in 2013 when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called “Amazon Prime Air.” The initiative uses remote-controlled machines that can perform an array of human tasks, to provide delivery services to customers.
