Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur, investor, and computer engineer most well-known for founding online retail platform Amazon. In this specific post, we'll be looking at Jeff Bezos' net worth in 2021.
Jeff Bezos' Net Worth in 2021 (estimate): $195 billion
Jeff Bezos' net worth in 2021 is a staggering $195 billion. This number is according to numerous reputable outlets, including Celebrity Net Worth.
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His last name would get changed to Bezos due to his mother remarrying. His family would move to Miami, wherein he attended Miami Palmetto High School while working as a line cook for McDonald's.
Bezos would go to graduate high school as the batch valedictorian, as well as getting awarded as a National Merit Scholar and a Silver Night Award. He'd then attend the University of Florida's Student Science Training Program.
He'd attend Princeton University afterward, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He'd attain a 4.2 GPA while in Princeton.
After graduating, Bezos would link up with fintech startup company Fitel, for whom he was tasked with building networks for international trade. He'd then get promoted to head of development and director of customer service.
That would be it for Bezos and Fitel, as Bezos went to the banking industry via Bankers Trust. He worked as a product manager for Bankers until joining hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. He became the company's fourth senior vice president before leaving the company when he was 30 years old.
A year before leaving D.E. Shaw & Co., Bezos decided to put up his own business in the form of an online bookstore. After leaving the hedge fund, he founded Amazon right there and then in his garage. The name Amazon came about for SEO reasons, as well as Bezos wanting to associate his budding platform to the largest river in the world (in that he hoped and envisioned for Amazon to become the largest online bookstore in the world). He started his online bookstore with a $300k investment from his parents.
Again, all of this attributes to Jeff Bezos' Net Worth in 2021.
Bezos had foreseen that the growth of the internet would offset the advantages of his more-established competitors i.e. the likes of Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar bookstores. He'd soon expand his products to include music and video, with other consumer goods coming soon thereafter.
After briefly dipping in 2002 when Amazon did poorly financially (due to massive spending and weaning revenues), Amazon has increased in size and revenue year after year. The company would only increase its rate of growth in 2007 after introducing the Amazon Kindle, the world's most recognizable e-reading device. Soon thereafter, Amazon has established itself as the world's top online shopping retailer.
Almost a decade later, Bezos sold more than 1 million shares of Amazon stock for $671 million, the largest sum of money he's ever raised from selling shares. He'd sell yet another million the following year, that time for an increased $756.7 million.
By 2017, Bezos would reach the pinnacle of wealth as he became the world's richest person, overtaking Microsoft's Bill Gates with a $90 billion net worth. His net worth would breach the $100 million mark later that year.
2018 saw Bezos' Amazon stock holdings appreciate to more than $109 billion. This coincided with the company reporting its highest-ever quarterly net income of $2 billion at around the same time. By March 2018, he was formally recognized by Forbes as the world's wealthiest man, with Bezos reaching a net worth of $112 billion. He was also labeled the “wealthiest person in modern history” by The Wall Street Journal, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, and MarketWatch.
However, his wealth would get decreased by nearly $11 million as controversies regarding tax avoidance and unethical industry practices saw Amazon's stock price fall by about 9%. These criticisms, coming from then-United States President Donald Trump, were fanned by related comments from Bernie Sanders. Sanders criticized Amazon's employee wages. This was after reports found that numerable Amazon employees in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Ohio relied on food stamps.
In response, Bezos announced a company-wide wage increase, with the company's minimum wage being raised to $15 viewed as support for the Fight for $15 movement.
Three years later, Bezos announced that he would be stepping down from his role as Amazon CEO after almost 27 years, getting replaced by Andy Jassy. Bezos is now Amazon's Executive Chairman of the Board. He gave his primary reason for stepping down as a means to give more time and focus to his other endeavors, like Blue Origin (human spaceflight startup), the Day 1 Fund (fund for non-profit organizations focused on fighting homelessness), the Bezos Earth Fund (fund to combat climate change), and others.
Bezos did take numerous hits to his net worth over the years, the most popular of which is his divorce from then-wife MacKenzie Bezos, wherein the Amazon founder was obligated to give the latter 25% of his Amazon shares. Nevertheless, he has accumulated a net worth amounting to $195 million in 2021, a rather staggering and incomprehensively large amount of money.
He is currently down in 2nd place for the title of world's richest man, just behind Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk ($202 billion). He is ahead of the likes of Louis Vuitton's Bernard Arnault, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and the aforementioned Bill Gates.
Were you stunned at all at Jeff Bezos' net worth in 2021?
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