Jeff Bezos plans to step down as Amazon CEO later this year. Here's how he makes and spends his $196 billion fortune.
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Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO in Q3 of 2021, CNBC reported.
Bezos' net worth is an estimated $196 billion, according to Forbes.
He spends his fortune on real estate, a Gulfstream Jet, and his space exploration company.
Amazon announced on Tuesday that CEO Jeff Bezos will step down from his role in the third quarter of 2021, CNBC reported.
In a letter to employees, Bezos wrote that Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services, will replace him. Bezos said he'll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board to focus on new products and early initiatives.
"As much as I still tap dance into the office, I'm excited about this transition," he wrote. "Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it's consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it's hard to put attention on anything else."
He continued: "As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I've never had more energy, and this isn't about retiring. I'm super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have."
In August, Bezos became the first person in human history to amass a net worth over $200 billion, according to Forbes. This milestone came alongside a boost in Amazon's share price, which soared despite the coronavirus pandemic that's upending the American economy. Bezos' agreement to surrender 25% of his Amazon stake to his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott in a divorce settlement last year ultimately didn't slow down the growth of his wealth overly much.
However, his net worth has since dropped to an estimated $196 billion. From real estate to space travel, here's how Bezos spends his money.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the source of much of his wealth, on July 5, 1994.
Source: Bloomberg
Bezos' parents were reportedly shocked that he would give up a cushy Wall Street job in order to sell books over the internet.
Source: "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
Bezos' parents eventually came around and invested about a quarter of a million dollars in the fledgling company, a stake that would be worth as much as $30 billion today.
Source: Bloomberg
Bezos also received a lot of support from his then-wife MacKenzie, who negotiated Amazon's first freight contract and did the company's accounting. Per the terms of their 2019 divorce settlement, MacKenzie holds a 4% stake in the company, which forms the majority of her $59 billion fortune.
Source: Forbes
Amazon made its initial public offering on May 15, 1997. Since that day, the split-adjusted stock price has increased over 170,000%
Amazon's rise left several early internet competitors in the dust. In the company's first post-IPO shareholder letter, Bezos mentioned strategic partnerships with several peers like America Online, Prodigy, and Yahoo that have either gone out of business entirely or been purchased by competitors in the years since.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon has steadily grown over the last two decades, and now sells a wide variety of consumer products, electronics, and digital media.
Source: Amazon
Another big growth area was Amazon Web Services. As of February 2018, the company's cloud services was a $17.5 billion business.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon has also grown through various acquisitions over time. The company's 2009 purchase of online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion stood as Amazon's biggest acquisition for about eight years.
Source: Visual Capitalist
That record was blown out of the water with Amazon's 2017 purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.
Source: Visual Capitalist
The Whole Foods acquisition has dramatically boosted Amazon's push into the grocery world. A 2019 study from OneClickRetail estimates that Amazon had an 18% share of the US online grocery market.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon's rise is the primary source of Bezos' fortune. Bezos remains Amazon's largest stockholder, owning 11% of the e-commerce giant. According to MacKenzie Bezos' statement on the couple's divorce, Bezos retained 75% of the couple's Amazon stock holdings and the voting power of MacKenzie's shares.
Bezos has made several investments in other companies, both on a personal level and through his venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions.
Source: Visual Capitalist
Bezos personally invested in Google in 1998, and his $1 million early investment would likely have made him a billionaire even without his extensive Amazon wealth.
Source: "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
Bezos Expeditions has invested in several startups, including blood testing biotech firm Grail, popular software developer website Stack Overflow, and Insider.
Business Insider was acquired by Axel Springer in 2015. Jeff Bezos is no longer invested.
Source: Visual Capitalist
One of Bezos' more notable purchases was his acquisition of The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013.
Source: Business Insider
Since Bezos' acquisition, the Post has greatly expanded its digital offerings, and readership has exploded.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos' wealth is so massive that, according to Business Insider's 2018 calculations when he had a mere $130 billion fortune, spending $88,000 to him was similar to an average American spending $1.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos is one of the country's biggest landowners, and he and his family own at least five homes across the US.
Source: Business Insider
One estate, with two homes on 5.3 acres of land, is located in Medina, Washington, not far from Amazon's Seattle headquarters.
Source: Business Insider
Insider's Harrison Jacobs visited Medina in 2017 to get a sense of what the haven for Seattle's mega-wealthy was like.
Source: Business Insider
Jacobs got a picture of the outside of Bezos' estate, but tall hedges and a gate blocked any view inside.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos also owns a Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, California. He bought the property in 2007 for a reported $24.25 million. He bought another, smaller house right next door a decade later.
Source: Business Insider
He also owns a ranch in Van Horn, Texas, which serves as a base for his Blue Origin space exploration company.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos purchased a townhouse in Washington, DC in 2016.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos owns several condos in the historic Century building at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan.
Source: Business Insider
In June 2019, the Amazon CEO reportedly dropped about $80 million on another three adjacent apartments in a different building at 212 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The spread consists of a three-story penthouse and the two units directly below it.
Source: Business Insider
Most recently, Bezos reportedly spent $165 million on another yet another Beverly Hills mansion - the Warner Estate. The Wall Street Journal reported the sale last February.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Bezos has traditionally been somewhat frugal with his ground transportation. As recently as 2013, he was still driving a Honda Accord, according to the book "The Everything Store."
Source: "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
However, Bezos also owns a $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos sometimes has a taste for exotic cuisine. The founder of e-commerce startup Woot recounted a breakfast with Bezos shortly after Amazon acquired the company at which the billionaire ordered octopus.
Source: Business Insider
The founder recounted Bezos explaining similarities between Amazon's acquisition of Woot and his offbeat breakfast order. "You're the octopus that I'm having for breakfast," Bezos said. "When I look at the menu, you're the thing I don't understand, the thing I've never had. I must have the breakfast octopus."
Source: Business Insider
Bezos has not engaged in public philanthropy to the same extent as many of his hyper-billionaire peers like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who have both pledged to donate the majority of their fortunes to charity.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie did sign Gates' Giving Pledge in May 2019, pledging to donate more than half of her fortune during her lifetime.
In a blog post on July 28, MacKenzie announced that over the past year she has donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations that support causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health, and climate change.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos has, however, supported Mary's Place, a Seattle organization that provides shelter and employment training to those who are homeless, and TheDream.US, which supports people who were brought to the US as undocumented immigrants when they were children.
Source: Business Insider
According to CNBC, Bezos has also donated significant sums to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington Foundation, and Princeton University.
Source: CNBC
Bezos also supports some more unusual ventures, like the Long Now Foundation, which seeks to build a giant mechanical "10,000 year clock" underground in West Texas.
Source: Business Insider
The clock is intended to be a "symbol for long-term thinking," according to a tweet from Bezos.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos has been fascinated and inspired by NASA and space travel since watching the Apollo moon landings in his childhood. In 2013, Bezos funded and led an expedition to recover one of the rocket engines from the Apollo 12 mission from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Source: The Seattle Times
Bezos' most ambitious venture may be Blue Origin, his space exploration company.
Blue Origin has had several successful test flights of its reusable New Shepard rocket, and is currently developing the larger, mostly reusable New Glenn rocket system, intended to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Source: Business Insider
In the long term, Bezos intends for Blue Origin to support large-scale human spaceflight, with the goal of colonizing the solar system.
Source: Business Insider
In 2018, Bezos told Matthias Döpfner, CEO of Insider's parent company Axel Springer, that he considers Blue Origin "the most important work [he's] doing."
Source: Business Insider
Indeed, Bezos told Döpfner that he plans to spend his entire fortune on space exploration, saying, "I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that."
Source: Business Insider
And last February, Bezos announced a pledge to spend $10 billion to fight climate change.
"I'm committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer," Bezos wrote on Instagram. "Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let's protect it, together."
Source: Business Insider
Bezos also spends plenty of cash in his personal life. He threw a star-studded birthday bash for girlfriend Lauren Sanchez in December 2019.
Source: Business Insider
While Bezos still holds the title of "the world's richest man," per Forbes, Bloomberg's estimates pin him as the second richest man following Elon Musk, who saw his net worth soar after Tesla entered the S&P 500 in December.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic upended the American economy in March, Bezos has continued to get wealthier. In August, he hit a wealth milestone no one else has ever reached.
Amazon's share price has surged throughout the pandemic as Americans practice social distancing to slow the virus' spread and increasingly turn to Amazon's delivery services for daily necessities, making Bezos the first person in human history with a net worth over $200 billion, per Forbes. It has since dropped to $196.2 billion.
Bezos doesn't plan to keep all of what he's added to his net worth so far this year, however. In April, he pledged to donate $100 million to food banks facing shortages due to the economic crisis spurred by the pandemic.
"My own time now is wholly focused on COVID-19 and how Amazon can best play its role," Bezos wrote in March. "I want you to know that Amazon will continue to do its part, and we won't stop looking for new opportunities to help."
Source: Insider
But Amazon's continuous growth has drawn increasing scrutiny from lawmakers, culminating in a historic antitrust hearing in front of the House House Antitrust Subcommittee on July 29, where Bezos testified alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
In prepared testimony released on his blog the day before, Bezos argued that Amazon's size benefits consumers, sellers, and the US economy, and that it still faces competition from Walmart, Instacart, and Shopify.
Source: Business Insider
Now, Bezos plans to step down as Amazon CEO and move into the role of Executive Chair of the Amazon Board. He plans to focus on new products and early initiatives.
Source: CNBC
Read the original article on Business Insider
