20 Facts about Jeff Bezos to enrich your knowledge about the world’s richest person

Who isn’t familiar with the richest person to walk on the face of the earth? Despite being one of the most famous people in the world, there are several unique as well as unknown facts abut Jeff Bezos that continue to intrigue us. Therefore, in this blog, we have compiled a list of 20 fascinating and interesting facts about Jeff Bezos. Before we proceed with our list, let us get a brief glimpse of Jeff Bezos.

From Bookstore Owner to World’s Largest Retailer

Born in 1964, Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, computer engineer, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, where he previously served as the president and CEO. With a net worth of around US$182 billion as of April 2022, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to both Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index and Forbes.

Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world’s largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world’s largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.

However, before becoming the richest person in the world, Bezos came from humble beginnings. Let us learn some interesting facts about Jeff Bezos who continues to stay atop the list of world’s richest people.

Interesting Facts

1. Jeff’s mother, Jacklyn Bezos, gave birth to him when she was a teenager.
2. According to the 2013 biography of Jeff Bezos by Brad Stone, “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” the now billionaires biological father was a unicyclist and circus performer.
3. When Bezos was a toddler, he reportedly felt he was “too old” to sleep in a crib and managed to take it apart with a screwdriver all by himself.
4. By the time he entered high school, Bezos had transformed his home garage into a laboratory for his own inventions, Harvard Business School wrote, citing Angela Duckworth’s “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”
5. Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed $200 billion as of November 2021, making him the world’s second-richest person.
6. Bezos holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. His first job was at a fintech start-up, Fitel. He was promoted as the director of customer service.
7. Bezos holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. His first job was at a fintech start-up, Fitel. He was promoted as the director of customer service.
8. He initially named his start-up Cadabra and later changed it to Amazon after the famous river. In the beginning, Bezos wasn’t confident about his business and went as far as warning investors there was a 70 percent chance of it going bankrupt.
9. In February 2020, Bezos bought Warner Estate, the costliest property in Los Angeles, spanning nine acres, for a price of $165 million from media mogul David Geffen.
10. Bezos retained the world’s richest person’s title even after he had given away a quarter of his total wealth to wife MacKenzie Scott when their marriage ended in 2019. Scott received $36 billion as compensation, making her the third richest woman in the world.
11. He also has substantial holdings in more traditional investments, such as real estate, as well as a significant number of shares in other prominent companies.
12. Bezos has also made multiple large charitable donations over the years, including funding several education projects via the Bezos Family Foundation.
13. Each year, he commits $1 billion to his space exploration company, Blue Origin.
14. On July 20, 2021, Bezos and three others boarded the New Shepard spacecraft and completed Blue Origin’s first successful crewed flight.
15. The Amazon CEO is very passionate about space travel and owns aerospace company Blue Origin which manufactures commercial rockets. In his high-school valedictorian speech, he said he wanted to create permanent colonies in orbiting space stations to preserve humanity and earth’s limited reserves.
16. Bezos has also made significant contributions to various causes at different points of his successful career. To help the needy during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Bezos donated $100 million to Feed America, a non-profit organization that runs food pantries across the country.
17. Jeff’s annual salary from Amazon in 2020 was $81,840, which qualifies as a middle-income wage in his home state of California.
18. In 2020, he took no bonuses, stocks or options, however, he earned $1,600,000 from “other types of compensation.”
19. Taking into account his rising net worth over the past few years, Bezos makes about $8.99 billion per month, $2.25 billion per week, or $321 million per day.
20. In August 2020, Bezos became the first person to achieve a net worth of $200 billion, exceeding French billionaire Bernard Arnault and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

This concludes our list of 20 wealthiest facts about Jeff Bezos which qualifies him as the world’s wealthiest person and quantifies his wealth.