Jeff Bezos and his financial growth! How did he accomplish his success and wealth?

When you earn a six-figure salary, you are labelled as a successful person in the immediate world around you. But Jeff Bezos decided to move out of this comfort definition of success and explored much broader horizons that redefine success. 

On 5 July 1994, Amazon was founded in Washington, United States. The company started in his garage for selling books online, now has a net worth of $314.9 billion. Bezos built a web retailing system when the world was still getting the hang of the internet. 

Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, has a net worth of $177 billion, according to Forbes in 2021. In 2017, he was declared the richest person in the world for the first time.

 In 1994, the internet growth rate was 2300% annually, and thus the idea to start Amazon was generated. The company initially consisted of him, his wife, and two programmers. 

Bezos invested his own $10000 at that stage. At the early stage, Amazon sold books in different states of the U.S. and 45 countries worldwide after few months of the launch. 

In 1996, Kleiner Perkins invested, and Amazon raised $8 million. In May 1997, Amazon went public, and in 1998, Bezos became an investor in Google. The sales in 1999 were recorded worth $1.64 billion. As the company diversified, sales climbed up from $511,000 in 1995 to $3billion in 2001. 

The share price of the company skyrocketed at every stage. Bezos also bought The Washington Post for $250 million in August 2013. The increase of 400% in the stocks was recorded from January 2015 to January 2021. In 2020, the largest source of affluence was the approximately 15.1% ownership of Amazon, and he owns 75 million shares alone.

Jeff even owns ‘Blue Origin,’ a space exploration company. It was one of the first commercial companies to launch a reusable rocket. Bezos invests $1 billion in this company, and on 18 July 2018, it sent spacecraft “New Shephard” to test safety systems and achieved success. 

He has invested in Twitter Inc., a business news website Business Insider and $35 million in transportation service Uber. Some other prominent companies owned by him are as follows: 

1. Zappos, a footwear brand acquired by Amazon Inc in 2009

2. IMDb or Internet Movie Database, website, which shows ratings and reviews of movies and TV shows

3. Alexa Web Services, to create web solutions and services 

4. Good Reads, to search the database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews.

5. Audible, online audiobook and podcast service

He is responsible for running a platform that accounted for 5% of all U.S. retail sales, and there was 49.1% of digital spending in 2018.

In 2013, Bezos announced his first plans for the company’s revolutionary Amazon Prime subscription business and Amazon Prime Air.

The path of success was not always like a bed of roses for Jeff Bezos, and there were many hindrances. For instance, the Fire phone resulted in a loss of $170 million as it couldn’t compete with Android and iPhone. 

Other major failures were Amazon Local, Amazon local registers, Music importer, Test Drive, Amazon WebPay, Endless.com, Askville, and many more.

However, projects like Amazon Kindle, Amazon Prime, AWS, and others are so successful that they could pay for the failure of some of his start-ups.

Jeff Bezos describes his vision in his open letter to the public that in Amazon, they wanted to create a culture of builders, curious people, explorers. He said, “A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again, and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight”. 

The pandemic did not stop Jeff Bezos from acquiring more success as the multi-billionaire nearly added $40 billion to his wealth. The share price of Amazon levitated over $2,000-mark throughout the lockdown, and its stock was trading at $2,572, which climbed to 1.09%. 

In February 2021, Bezos announced that he would step down as the CEO of Amazon to focus on other projects.

Jeff’s career journey exemplifies the vision, passion, and innovation in the ideas. He has undoubtedly managed to bring revolution in various industries, and it has motivated many entrepreneurs to bring up follow the same path.