TUE, June 19 2018-theG&BJournal-Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world, is richer than he has ever been before. Since June 1, the tech titan’s net worth has grown over $5 billion and now totals $141.9 billion, according to the Forbes World’s Billionaires list. That makes Bezos worth roughly $49 billion more than Bill Gates and about $60 billion more than Warren Buffett.
This latest win for Bezos is just one of many he has enjoyed this year.
Amazon’s customer base has remained loyal through the latest Prime price hike in exchange for a slew of services and perks, and the company’s stock has continued to increase in value. Even Buffett now regrets not investing in Amazon when he had the chance.
Earlier this year, Bezos officially became the richest person in the world and also helped make Amazon the second most valuable company in the world, behind Apple. And his success can arguably be traced back to a risk he took when he was 30 years old.
Bezos was a straight-A high school student and the class valedictorian, and he got accepted via early admission to Princeton, according to Brad Stone’s biography “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.” He majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and then went on to work various finance and tech jobs after college.
It was while serving as a vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw in the 1990s that Bezos came up with the idea to sell books over the Internet. Doing so, though, would mean taking a significant risk and perhaps sacrificing his stable job.-CNBC
