A record $100 billion worth of personal wealth was broken in the early hours of November 25.
Shares also rose to a record high, rising 2.6 per cent to $1,186, helped by strong Black Friday sales of $1.5bn from Amazon.
Bezos’ personal wealth passed the $100 billion mark for the first time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
How did Bezos rise from amazon’s birth to a billion-dollar billionaire?
The growth of the richest man
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 21, 1964. His biological father divorced his mother when He was 18 months old, and his mother later married Mike Bezos, changing her last name after her stepfather, giving birth to Jeff Bezos.
Photos of Bezos as a child (from Catch All: Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
Bezos spent summers between the ages of 4 and 16 repairing cowpens, steers and tractors on his grandfather’s farm, an “idyllic childhood.”
In high school, he won back-to-back science student of the year awards, twice math Student of the Year awards, and a science prize from the Miami Herald.
At Princeton, he switched his major from physics to computer science, earning a double bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science.
After graduation, he first joined Fitel as a programmer. His job was to write communication protocols through which computer networks could understand each other and exchange data. In less than a year, he became vice president of the company.
In April 1988, Bezos left Fitel after two years to join Bankers Trust. Shortly after his arrival, bezos, 26, became the youngest vice president in charge of developing BTWorld’s communications system.
In 1990, he met David Shaw. In December, Bezos became a vice president at D.E.Shaw, where he met his wife, Mackenzie Tuttle.
The seed of entrepreneurship of the richest man
1994 was a turning point for Bezos.
When Bezos, who was in charge of developing the company’s new Internet business, proposed an online book business, Shaw said no.
At a time when nearly 1.3 million books were published in the United States, only 300,000 audio and video products were controlled by six major audio and video companies, and Internet usage was growing at a rate of 2,300 percent a year.
Bezos, who had just turned 30, saw the huge market and came up with an idea to create an online bookstore with millions of books.
In the summer of 1994, Bezos quit his job and moved to Seattle.
In 1995, bay registered a company called Cadabra with $300,000 in start-up capital.
Bezos wasn’t happy with the name, so he named it after the world’s longest river, the Amazon.
In addition to the hope that my company can achieve the best development in both scale and content in the future, the most important thing is that this name starts with A and can be ranked first in all major search engines.
In the spring of 1995, Bezos launched Amazon’s Web beta.
On April 3, a man named John Wainwright became their first customer, completing amazon’s first order, and the building on Amazon’s Seattle campus is now named Wainwright.
Amazon launched in July 1995.
In the following two years, Amazon made outstanding achievements in the book market with its unique online sales model and low price with its innovative consciousness and customer-oriented concept.
The richest man’s pioneering territory
On May 15, 1997, Amazon went public at a high valuation of $438 million.
After its successful listing, Amazon soon changed its positioning and began to expand and acquire on a large scale, aiming to build Amazon into a comprehensive e-commerce brand to form economies of scale.
When Amazon launched its music store in 1998, it overtook its rival CDnow to become the largest online music retailer. The huge economies of scale made investors aware of amazon’s business value.
Its share price has risen fivefold in a year.
Since then, Amazon has also acquired IMDb, a database company that integrates online movies, TV and video games, Planetall, a social network company, and Alexa, a web traffic analysis company, to comprehensively improve its technology and expand its product line.
Amazon’s stock hit rock bottom in 2000 amid the dot-com bubble.
Bezos has had to put expansion on hold and make sweeping changes: buy books directly from publishers to save on channel costs; Provide IT infrastructure and logistics warehousing services for third-party sellers; Major layoffs, consolidation of offices, thereby reducing administrative costs, etc.
It turned into a profit in 2001.
Amazon’s 2005 launch of Prime, which allows users to get two-day shipping for a subscription, was controversial within the company because of the high cost of the service, but it was a huge success in the years that followed, generating a lot of customers and spending dollars for Amazon.
Amazon pioneered AWS Web Services in 2006 to help third parties expand their businesses by leveraging Amazon’s massive data and processing modules.
In 2007, FBA was introduced, which provides a sales platform for third-party merchants and integrates them into their own inventory and logistics systems.
Amazon has replicated its approach to economies of scale in selling books to ecommerce, with nearly 90 entities with separate retail sites in 15 countries.
In July 2015, its market capitalization hit $260 billion, overtaking brick-and-mortar retailer Wal-Mart to become the world’s largest retailer.
In 2016, it delivered more than 2 billion products to customers worldwide.
Over the past 22 years, amazon has built a unique and successful business model with its customer-oriented, scale-oriented philosophy, even though it has been teetering on the edge of profit and loss.
As Amazon has grown, so has Bezos’ personal wealth.
The richest man’s digital intelligence empire
Bezos is not interested in immediate profits, but in expanding and building a digital intelligence empire.
Digital reading system
In 2004, Bezos was inspired to own his own e-book business by Apple digital Music.
In 2007, Amazon began its shift to digital, announcing the launch of its Kindle e-book reader, which had been in development for more than three years.
The Kindle family has gained a huge audience with its rich digital content and low price.
In order to curb publishers’ control over content resources, self-publishing companies were acquired to expand business models.
Amazon bought BookSurge, an on-demand publishing company, in 2005.
In 2009, Amazon started self-publishing by integrating BookSurge into CreateSpace and launching KDP.
In June 2015, Amazon introduced a pay-per-page service that pays authors according to how many pages they read.
Digital music system
First, change the marketing model.
Amazon broke the fixed-price model in 2007 with a “variable digital music pricing model”, which allowed consumers to download either individual tracks or albums as they liked.
Second, expand the drM-free world of music.
In 2008 amazon, in partnership with major record labels such as SONY BMG, EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music, made around 4.5m drM-free tracks available to consumers, while Apple’s iTunes was able to offer only around 2m.
Third, improve service quality.
Adopting a series of low price strategies and promotional activities to stimulate the sales of music products; It launched cloud Player, offering 5 gigabytes of storage and a free upgrade to 20 gigabytes for music users, which Apple’s iTunes doesn’t offer.
Digital video system
In 2011, Amazon made a big push into digital film and television.
In September, Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, which offers free access to movies and music, including e-books, for less than half the price of an iPad.
Amazon also launched Prime Instant Video in 2011, bringing its total library of movies to more than 40,000 titles.
To provide consumers with better access to movies, Amazon has partnered with film and television production companies such as Paramount and Discovery, as well as content companies such as CBS and ABC.
In January 2015, Amazon created a new division, Amazon Original Movies, with plans to produce 12 original movies a year for theatrical release and online download starting in 2015.
In September 2015, Disney Studios also proposed a partnership with Amazon.
Digital television system
Although Amazon entered the field of Internet TV later than Google and Apple, in fact, Amazon’s layout of Internet TV has already begun.
Amazon has been working with HDTV makers (SONY, Panasonic, etc.) and digital video players (Roku) since around 2010.
In April 2014, Amazon announced its entry into Internet TV by officially selling the Fire TV, a $99 set-top box.
In 2013, Amazon released 14 pilot series produced by its original video division, which also offers on-demand TV shows for TV users.
In October 2014, Amazon released a new HDMI streaming device, the Fire TV Stick, to further refine its TV ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence system
Amazon, the world’s largest public cloud data provider, has been involved in ARTIFICIAL intelligence for several years and has already dabbled in commercial use.
Amazon’s biggest contribution to AI is its AI voice assistant Alexa.
In 2014, Amazon launched the Alexa as the core of the smart speaker Echo, so far, sales have approached ten million.
At the same time, Amazon is building an ARTIFICIAL intelligence ecosystem, and Alexa is already being used in various fields.
At the end of 2016, Amazon unveiled a new AI platform, bringing with it three machine learn-based tools for image recognition, speech recognition and chat interaction.
Quietly, Amazon’s AI technology covers infrastructure, platforms, services and more.
Bezos, the “bald man”, advocates “technology flow” and applies technology to Amazon to the extreme. Through mergers and acquisitions, he absorbs the experience and wealth accumulated by traditional giants such as Wal-Mart and integrates it with Internet technology, enabling Amazon’s growth to achieve the “flywheel effect”.
Where will Bezos take Amazon in the future?
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