Move over, Bill Gates: There’s a new richest man in the world.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laid claim to that title for the first time on Thursday, based on his company’s surging stock price, according to a real-time list of the world’s billionaires compiled by Forbes. The rankings bounced back and forth, but at one point Thursday afternoon, Bezos had a net worth of $91.4 billion, eclipsing Gates’ paltry $90 billion.
However the markets close on Thursday, it’s a symbolic passing of the torch and another reminder of the dynamism of American business. Just over 20 years ago, Bezos launched Amazon as a fledgling text-based website selling books. He had quit his Wall Street job, hired a few programmers, and set up shop in his converted garage outside Seattle. He built the company’s first desks out of $60 wooden doors he bought at Home Depot and brought his wife in as the company’s first accountant. He paid himself a salary of $64,000 a year.
It was a different time, at the dawn of the Internet age, but it wasn’t really all that long ago. Here’s what Amazon’s humble start was like, according to the 2013 biography The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Information by journalist Brad Stone:
Nobody knew then, of course, that Amazon would upend chain bookstores—just as chain bookstores were then in the process of upending independent booksellers. In those early days, Bezos told investors that the company had a 70 percent chance of failing.
Fast forward to today. Amazon had sales of $136 billion last year and ranked No. 12 on the Fortune 500 list of largest U.S. companies. It sells virtually everything and accounts for an estimated 43 percent of all online retail sales. It helped pioneer e-readers, is driving retailers of all stripes into bankruptcy and is trying to buy a major grocery chain, Whole Foods.
Today, Bezos, 53, owns about 17 percent of Amazon. Every time its stock rises 1 percent, his net worth goes up by around $1 billion. In 2017 alone, Amazon’s stock has risen by about 40 percent.
How did Bezos get it there? Like other legendary U.S. business leaders, he led Amazon to success through hard work and relentless attention to customer needs—even to the point of being personally abrasive to staffers, in the mold of Apple founder Steve Jobs. From The Everything Store:
If history teaches us anything, it’s that time atop the U.S. business is ephemeral. There are always other entrepreneurs and innovators gunning to be the next Walmart, the next Microsoft, the next Amazon. Companies are moving into markets that could hardly be imagined just a few years ago, such as space tourism and self-driving cars.
Who will be next?
