Here’s what we know about Jeff Bezos’ net worth.
Imagine someone making USD 1.43 million per hour. That’s the rate at which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos adds money to his massive net worth.
One of the world’s richest persons, Bezos needs no introduction. He founded or owns some of the world’s biggest businesses, including private space company Blue Origin and mainstream American newspaper The Washington Post.
Bezos holds the Guinness record for being the world’s first centibillionaire (a person whose net worth is USD 100 billion) in the 32-year history of Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index. He has been the world’s richest person on Forbes’ list for four years, from 2018 to 2021.
He served as Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) till July 2021, subsequently becoming the executive chairperson at the company.
A look at how Jeff Bezos built his fortune reveals that he diversified his wealth through strategic investments and by creating companies that are in the business of rapidly expanding developments in the world of science and technology. He kept pace with the dot-com boom of the late 90s and has now gone ahead of the curve, establishing a name for himself as an astute businessman, a tech pioneer and a philanthropist.
What is the net worth of Jeff Bezos?
According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos had a net worth of around USD 191 billion (as of 7 February 2024). His net worth made Bezos the third-richest individual in the world behind LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Bezos is one of the eight persons in the top 10 of the Forbes billionaire list whose source of wealth is Big Tech (major American tech giants).
When Bezos became a centibillionaire on 6 March 2018, it also made him the world’s richest person for the first time on Forbes’ list.
The publication estimated at the time that his net worth rose by USD 39.2 billion in just 12 months to USD 112 billion. He, thus, broke the record set by software company Oracle’s Larry Ellison whose net worth rose to USD 37.5 billion after a boom in stock price during the dot-com bubble in 2000.
It was not the first time that Bezos had recorded a massive gain in his fortune. Forbes noted that his net worth climbed by USD 27.6 billion in 12 months, leading up to the 2017 list.
Bezos’ net worth was, therefore, around USD 45 billion in 2016, USD 72 billion in 2017, and USD 112 billion in 2018. In other words, his net worth climbed at least USD 67 billion in just two years — a testimony to the incredible performance of Amazon in this period.
Reports suggest that Bezos earned a base salary of USD 88,840 from 1998 till he stepped down as CEO in 2021. Amazon’s annual proxy statement for 2022 reveals that Bezos’s salary remained at USD 81,840.
“Due to Mr. Bezos’s substantial ownership in Amazon, Mr. Bezos requested not to receive additional compensation and has never received annual cash compensation in excess of his current amount,” the statement says.
Including additional compensation, his total annual earnings from pay were around USD 1.6 million in 2022.
How did Jeff Bezos build his incredible net worth?
Jeff Bezos’ rise isn’t a ‘rags-to-riches’ story, but he did indeed have a pretty ordinary beginning — quite like tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Bezos was born on 12 January 1964 as Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen to Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen. He was 17 months old when his parents divorced and four years old when he was adopted by his mother’s second husband, Cuban immigrant Miguel “Mike” Bezos.
Miguel worked as an engineer at Exxon (now ExxonMobil). Along with his mother, Bezos has often credited Miguel for the success he achieved in life. Though he came to know about his birth father when he was 10 years old, neither Bezos nor Ted, who died in 2015, ever met each other.
Bezos graduated from high school in 1982 and from Princeton in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), summa cum laude. His first job was at a fintech telecommunications start-up called Fitel. He entered the banking industry by joining Bankers Trust, where he worked till 1990. His final job was as an investment banker with D. E. Shaw & Co., where he worked for four years before founding Amazon.
The start with Amazon
It is widely known that Jeff Bezos built his centibillionaire net worth status, thanks to the mammoth success of his first company — Amazon.
Bezos left his job and founded a company named Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994 from his garage in Bellevue, Washington. By July 1995, Bezos had renamed Cadabra to Amazon and opened an online bookstore under Amazon.com.
The initial investment in Amazon came from his parents, who invested around USD 250,000 in 1995 in Bezos’ company for a 6 per cent stake. A video Bezos shared in November 2023 on Instagram shows what the first Amazon.com office looked like.
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According to Brad Stone’s 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos warned his parents that there was a 70 per cent chance the business might tank.
“I want you to know what the risks are, because I still want to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work,” Jeff told his parents, according to Stone.
Nevertheless, Jacklyn and Miguel had faith in the capability of their son. In 2018, the investment was worth USD 30 billion. It is worth several billions more now, technically meaning that both Jacklyn and Miguel are billionaires in their own right.
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas R. Hofstadter was the first book ever sold on Amazon. By the end of the first month, Amazon had shipped books to all 50 states in the US and 45 countries.
Profits were non-existent till 2003, though Bezos kept pumping whatever the business earned back into the business to help it grow. During this period, Amazon went beyond just selling books and into a proper e-commerce realm.
Two years after its formation as Amazon, the company went public. The move helped Bezos plan bigger and faster. The company began its focus on building warehouses throughout the US. Today, Amazon warehouses and marketplaces are present in some of the biggest countries, including India, China, Japan and Brazil, in every continent helping the company deliver anything from pin to foldable house to its customers.
Amazon has a market capital of over USD 1.7 trillion. It was the third company in the world, after Chinese state-owned oil and gas major PetroChina Company Limited and American tech giant Apple.
Jeff Bezos owns 9.56 per cent of Amazon and is the largest shareholder. He gave a quarter of his then-16 per cent Amazon stake to his former wife, MacKenzie Scott, when they divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage.
MacKenzie, who is an author and philanthropist, has a net worth of around USD 40 billion, making her one of the richest women in the world. She was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2020 and the world’s most powerful woman by Forbes in 2021.
Prime Video, AWS and other businesses under Amazon
One of Amazon’s most significant services is the subscription-based Amazon Prime, which was launched in 2005. The service offers a range of benefits to Amazon customers, such as same-day delivery, shopping discounts and food deliveries.
Its most famous offering, however, is Amazon Prime Video. Part of the family of Prime’s sub-brands, Prime Video was launched in 2006 and is now the world’s second-largest streaming platform with more than 200 million subscribers.
Amazon also has numerous subsidiaries through creations, mergers or acquisitions. Chief of them includes social cataloguer Goodreads, audiobook seller Audible, entertainment database IMDb, and video game live-streaming service Twitch.
In March 2022, Amazon bought the renowned American media giant Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. (MGM) for USD 8.5 billion. The acquisition turned MGM into an Amazon subsidiary under Amazon MGM Studios. The deal gave Amazon Prime Video access to more than 4,000 film titles owned by MGM, including the Rocky and James Bond franchises.
Its acquisition of Whole Foods Market in 2017 gave Amazon instant ownership of around 470 brick-and-mortar grocery stores.
One of its major subsidiaries is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was launched as a cloud computing web service provider by Amazon in 2002. AWS has had a dominant hold on cloud infrastructure services for over a decade. It currently has a market share of 31 per cent, generating USD 24.2 billion in sales during Q4 2023 for an annual sales figure of USD 97 billion. AWS’ next biggest competitor is Microsoft, which has a market share of 24 per cent.
In September 2023, Amazon announced that it was making a USD 4 billion investment in cash in artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic. The move aims to help the company gain leverage against competitors in the generative AI market, especially Microsoft. As part of the deal, AWS was selected as the primary cloud provider for Anthropic.
Besides its online and related operations, Amazon is also a manufacturer of consumer electronics devices such as the Kindle and the Echo, the latter of which was the first to have Amazon’s voice-activated AI chatbot, Alexa.
Other companies that Jeff Bezos owns
Besides Amazon, Jeff Bezos also owns private spaceflight and rocket engine manufacturing company Blue Origin. He founded it in 2000 and funds the company by selling USD 1 billion of Amazon stocks every year.
Blue Origin is based in based in Kent, Washington. The company’s most famous creation is the fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle, New Shepard.
The vehicle flew for the first time in April 2015 and had a successful high-altitude test in July 2018. In 2016, Blue Origin was awarded the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy by the US National Aeronautic Association (NAA) for demonstrating rocket booster reusability with the New Shepard.
On 20 July 2021, Bezos, accompanied by his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen, completed Blue Origin’s first successful crewed flight, climbing to an altitude of around 100 km before landing safely.
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The company is currently developing the heavy-lift launch vehicle, New Glenn.
In May 2019, Jeff Bezos unveiled the company’s Blue Moon lunar lander. According to the official website of the company, “Blue Moon MK1 will provide cargo transport, leveraging the 7-meter fairing of the New Glenn launch vehicle, to deliver up to three metric tons anywhere on the lunar surface.”
In May 2023, Blue Origin won a USD 3.4 billion contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that made Blue Moon part of the ambitious Artemis V moon mission.
“Blue Origin will design, develop, test, and verify its Blue Moon lander to meet NASA’s human landing system requirements for recurring astronaut expeditions to the lunar surface, including docking with Gateway, a space station where crew transfer in lunar orbit,” NASA said in a statement.
NASA added that the contract includes one uncrewed demonstration mission to the lunar surface and a crewed demonstration on the Artemis V mission in 2029.
The other major business that Bezos owns is the prominent Left-leaning media entity The Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013 for USD 250 million.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal gave Bezos a footing in American political circles and a boost to the company’s web traffic.
In a July 2023 report, The New York Times, however, underlined that The Washington Post was set to lose about USD 100 million and is not profitable. The report also revealed details of a decline in staff morale due to frictions in the senior management.
Major investments by Jeff Bezos
Bezos Expeditions is the venture capital firm created by Jeff Bezos to invest the money he has made with the success of Amazon. Reports suggest that he was one of the first investors in Google, having pumped in USD 250,000 in 1998. That investment is likely in several billions of dollars today.
Among the other investments made through Bezos Expeditions are healthcare and biotech companies such as GRAIL, Juno Therapeutics, Unity Biotechnology and Zocdoc. He has also invested in ride-sharing company Uber as well as Airbnb.
One of his most significant investments was when he funded Twitter (now X) in 2008. The company was bought by Elon Musk in 2022.
Philanthropy and the Bezos Family Foundation
Jeff Bezos’ parents, Jacklyn and Miguel, founded the Bezos Family Foundation — a philanthropic organisation which works to provide education for children. Both Jacklyn and Miguel have used their billions to donate to the foundation.
According to CNBC, they contributed around 600,000 Amazon shares to the non-profit between 2001 and 2016. Due to the massive funding, the foundation has been able to contribute USD 166 million to NYU-Langone Health in 2021 and USD 710 million to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in 2022 among other major donations.
Bezos personally donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various charities through the 2010s. The donations have gone up in recent years, particularly in the last few years of the last decade.
For instance, he announced a USD 2 billion commitment to a fund to help deal with homelessness in American cities and establish schools for low-income communities in September 2018. Two years later, in February 2020, he pledged USD 10 billion through the Bezos Earth Fund to combat climate change.
Then, in November 2021, he attended the 2021 COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland where he pledged to donate USD 2 billion towards nature conservation and restructuring food systems.
“In too many parts of the world, nature is already flipping from carbon sink to a carbon source,” he said at the conference.
Personal assets that Jeff Bezos owns
Jeff Bezos has used the fortune he built through Amazon wisely. He has invested in real estate, which reportedly is worth around USD 570 million. He owns a Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, a lake house in Washington’s Medina, several apartments in New York City, a mansion in Washington DC as well as a ranch in Texas among other properties.
His most recent purchase, reported by Bloomberg on 2 April 2024, was a USD 90 million property on South Florida’s Indian Creek Island. It was Bezos’ third property purchase on the 1.2 sq km island known to have only 41 residential homes.
His first property on the island cost him USD 68 million. After purchasing a second property for USD 79 million, he announced in November 2023 his decision to leave Seattle and reside close to his parents — who live in Miami. The New York Post reported at the time that his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, will also join him.
(Hero image: Courtesy of Manjunath Kiran/AFP; Featured image: Courtesy of Jeff Bezos/@jeffbezos/Instagram)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
– Who is the richest person in the world?
The title of the richest person in the world has kept changing hands quite frequently in the last few years. It usually oscillates between LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and SpaceX founder-chairman Elon Musk.
– How much is the CEO of Amazon worth?
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, received a pay of USD 1.3 million for 2022. It marked a drop of around 99 per cent in his compensation package of USD 212 million in the year prior. But he owns two million shares of Amazon.com as of February 2023 as well, which was worth about USD 203 million.
– Who owns most of Amazon?
Individual investors own about 42.5 per cent of Amazon while institutional investors, such as Vanguard, Invesco and Fidelity, own around 29.6 per cent. Individual shareholders include Jeff Bezos, Andrew Jassy and Douglas Herrington. Bezos is the company’s largest shareholder.
Manas Sen Gupta writes at the intersection of tech, entertainment and history. His works have appeared in publications such as The Statesman, Myanmar Matters, Hindustan Times and News18/ETV. In his spare time, Manas loves studying interactive charts and topographic maps. When not doing either, he prefers reading detective fiction. Spring is his favourite season and he can happily eat a bowl of noodles any time of the day.
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