Altos Labs is a well-funded biotechnology company dedicated to harnessing cellular reprogramming to develop longevity therapeutics. After a surge in online readership in 2016, the paper was profitable for the first time since Bezos made the purchase in 2013. A year later, Bezos took on 130,000 new employees when he ramped up hiring at company distribution centers. Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company’s 1997 equity offering (equivalent to $104,174,357 in 2024) to finance the aggressive acquisition of smaller competitors. In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company’s products to include a variety of other consumer goods. At the time, website listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with “A” would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches.
- In January 2016, Bezos set out to reinvent the newspaper as a media and technology company by reconstructing its digital media, mobile platforms, and analytics software.
- In July 2018, it was announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person.
- In February 2025, Bezos announced that the opinion section of the Post will give voice only to opinions that support “personal liberties” and “free markets”, and that divergent opinions will not be published by the Post.
- E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling.
- Prior to settling in Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.
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Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. According to Forbes Bezos was the second-wealthiest person in America and the third-wealthiest person in the world in 2023. On July 17, 2018, he was designated the “wealthiest person in modern history”c by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Fortune, MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. His wealth’s rapid growth from 2016 to 2017 sparked a variety of assessments about how much money Bezos earned on a controlled, reduced time scale.
- In February 2020, Bezos purchased the Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million (equivalent to $200,473,833 in 2024), a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area.
- In January 2018, an announcement was made concerning Bezos’s role within a new, unnamed healthcare company.
- In May 2017, Bezos gave $1 million (equivalent to $1,282,786 in 2024) to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides pro bono legal services for American journalists.
Either way, cloud compute isn’t exactly cheap to run either. Microsoft was already working on a cloud-based version of Windows for consumers, based on its business-grade cloud PC product Windows 365. That is, of course, unless those investors and nation states stop believing AI can deliver anything more impressive than repackaged reddit answers, memeslop, and blog posts for the vast majority … With nation states effectively printing money to outbid consumer tech companies on basic components, I’m not sure demand will come down any time soon. There’s a hard cap on the amount of chips the human race can physically produce at any one time, at least as of writing. Luckily for Altman and shareholders, those unrealized promises require trillions of dollars worth of investment, specifically in cloud computing solutions, to actualize.
The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million donation (equivalent to $41,322,157 in 2024) to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors. Bezos announced in September 2018 that he would commit approximately $2 billion (equivalent to $2,504,373,178 in 2024) to a fund to deal with American homelessness and establish a network of non-profit preschools for low-income communities. As of November 30, 2025, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranks Bezos the fifth wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $255 billion.
Personal life
In February 2020, Bezos purchased the Warner Estate from David Geffen for $165 million (equivalent to $200,473,833 in 2024), a record price paid for a residence in the Los Angeles area. Bezos had also purchased three adjoining apartments at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan for $7.65 million in 1999 (equivalent to $14,439,642 in 2024); he bought a fourth unit in that building for $5.3 million in 2012 (equivalent to $7,258,980 in 2024). In June 2019, Bezos purchased three adjoining apartments overlooking Madison Square Park in Manhattan, including a penthouse, for a combined total of $80 million (equivalent to $98,388,650 in 2024), making this one of the most expensive real estate purchases within New York City in 2019. Bezos’s net worth increased by $33.6 billion (equivalent to $43,101,601,955 in 2024) from January 2017 to January 2018. He unseated Bill Gates ($90 billion, equivalent to $112,696,793,003 in 2024), who was $6 billion (equivalent to $7,513,119,534 in 2024) ahead of Warren Buffett ($84 billion, equivalent to $105,183,673,469 in 2024), ranked third. On October 10, 2017, he made an estimated $6.24 billion (equivalent to $8,004,583,220 in 2024) in 5 minutes, slightly less than the then annual gross domestic product of Kyrgyzstan.
By the time the Forbes list was calculated in March 2016, his net worth was registered at $45.2 billion (equivalent to $59,220,022,185 in 2024). Bezos rose to become the fifth richest person in the world hours before market close; he gained $7 billion in one hour (equivalent to $8,765,306,122 in 2024). His wealth rose by 85.2% in 2010, leaving him with $12.6 billion (equivalent to $18,168,380,894 in 2024). His wealth plummeted even more the following year, dropping 66.6% to $2.0 billion (equivalent to $3,551,588,047 in 2024). The company left stealth mode and launched on January 19, 2022, with a start capital of $3 billion (equivalent to $3,223,447,805 in 2024) and an executive team led by Hal Barron.
When the 2017 list was issued, Bezos’s net worth was registered at $72.8 billion (equivalent to $93,386,804,236 in 2024), adding $27.6 billion from the previous year (equivalent to $35,404,887,320 in 2024). A year later, he entered the top ten when he increased his net worth to a total of $50.3 billion (equivalent to $66,725,354,485 in 2024). After the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, his net worth would decrease to $6.8 billion (equivalent to $9,930,942,813 in 2024)—a 17.7% drop. From 2005 to 2007, he quadrupled his net worth to $8.7 billion (equivalent to $14,006,866,587 in 2024). The following year, his net worth increased by 66.66% to $2.5 billion (equivalent to $4,273,245,297 in 2024). He lost $500 million the following year (equivalent to $874,098,057 in 2024), which brought his net worth down to $1.5 billion (equivalent to $2,622,294,172 in 2024).
In July 2018, it was announced that Bezos had priced commercial spaceflight tickets from $200,000 to $300,000 per person. Although the crash was viewed as a setback, news outlets noted how far the company went from its founding-to-date in advancing spaceflight. In September 2011, one of the company’s uncrewed prototype vehicles crashed during a short-hop test flight. After the company gained the public’s attention during the late 2000s, Bezos additionally indicated his interest in reducing the cost of space travel for humans while also increasing the safety of extraterrestrial travel.
On August 4, 2016, Bezos sold another million of his shares for $756.7 million (equivalent to $991,411,301 in 2024). By the end of 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks (equivalent to $3,651,787,440 in 2024), as its cash balances dipped to only $350 million (equivalent to $639,062,802 in 2024). Among these acquisitions were his purchase of a majority stake in pets.com in 1999 and a purchase of a portion of kozmo.com for $60 million (equivalent to $113,252,097 in 2024), both of which would fail after the dot-com bubble collapse in 2000. Prior to settling in Seattle, Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes. With Bezos at the helm and Scott taking an integral role in its operation—writing checks, keeping track of the books, and negotiating the company’s first freight contracts—the foundation was laid for this garage-run operation. In spring 1994, Bezos read that web usage was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year and eventually decided to establish an online bookstore.
He purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million (equivalent to $337,464,286 in 2024) and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. According to Forbes, as of December 2025, Bezos’s estimated net worth is US$239.4 billion, making him the fourth richest person in the world.
‘I Won’t Connect My Dishwasher To Your Stupid Cloud’
He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Unless the economics of local hardware truly does fall off a cliff somewhere down the line, I can’t see Bezos’ vision of a cloud-only future coming true any time soon — even for casual PC users. The vast majority of apps and services people engage with online are all entirely cloud-based, from Fortnite to TikTok. Cancel or change your plan anytime during your trial.
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Bezos donated $100,000 (equivalent to $144,193 in 2024) towards a movement against a Washington state income tax in 2010 for “top earners”. Subsequently, National Enquirer revealed that Bezos had an affair with media personality Lauren Sánchez; the affair with Sánchez had lasted for months. He had lobbied Paramount for the role apropos of Alexa and his personal/professional interest in speech recognition. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the opinion section of the Post will give voice only to opinions that support “personal liberties” and “free markets”, and that divergent opinions will not be published by the Post. Post opinion columnists jointly authored an article calling the decision to not endorse a “terrible mistake”, and it was condemned by the Washington Post Guild, a union unit representing Post employees. Around 750 employees at The Washington Post went on a brief strike in December 2023 in response to Bezos’ plans to lay off staff.
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His net worth decreased to $6.1 billion a year later (equivalent to $11,137,951,691 in 2024), a 40.5% drop. He was first included on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list in 1999 with an estimated net worth of $10.1 billion (equivalent to $19,064,103,076 in 2024), which placed his on the 19th position in the world and 10th in the USA. Instead of using presentation slides, Bezos requires high-level employees to present information with six-page narratives. Bezos has been known to publicly contest claims made in critical articles, as exemplified in 2015 when he sent a memo to employees denouncing a New York Times piece.
Forensic analysis of Bezos’s mobile phone conducted by advisory firm FTI Consulting, concluded it “highly probable” that the hack was achieved using a malicious file hidden in a video sent in a WhatsApp message to Bezos from the personal account of the crown prince on May 1, 2018. Bezos and Trump were reported to have met for dinner again in February 2025, on the same night that Bezos announced changes to the Washington Post’s opinion policies to promote “free markets and personal liberties” and suppress divergent opinions. Nevertheless, Bezos congratulated Trump on his second election victory, posting on X, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. On November 22, 2021, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million (equivalent to $116,038,315 in 2024) to the Obama Foundation to “help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders” and requested the Obama Presidential Center’s plaza to be named after John Lewis. In 2019, a PAC linked to Bezos spent over $1 million (equivalent to $1,229,858 in 2024) in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the reelection bid of Seattle city council member and activist Kshama Sawant.
I view Jeff Bezos the way I view rich people
In 2018, more than 400 Washington Post employees wrote an open letter to Bezos criticizing his poor wages and benefits for his employees. Bezos added a remote 14-acre estate on La Perouse Bay in Maui, encircled by inactive lava fields, to his real estate holdings for $78 million in 2022 (equivalent to $83,809,643 in 2024). Bezos is the owner of the Y721, a luxury superyacht estimated to cost more than $500,000,000 (equivalent to $537,241,301 in 2024); it is the largest yacht in the world.
Every ChatGPT question, Grok bikini deepfake, or Copilot MS Paint memeslop requires cloud compute to generate. — The AI-fueled hardware shortage will kill local PCs, paving the way for subscription-based cloud computing
In 2013, Bezos Expeditions funded the recovery of two Saturn V first-stage Rocketdyne F-1 engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Bezos used Bezos Expeditions to fund several philanthropic projects, including an Innovation center at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry and the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics at Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Bezos also supports philanthropic efforts through direct donations and non-profit projects funded by Bezos Expeditions. In January 2018, an announcement was made concerning Bezos’s role within a new, unnamed healthcare company.
E. Shaw & Co, a newly created hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling. At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high-school student and his father was 19. In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion (equivalent to $242,998,585,573 in 2024).
