27 years of building the Amazon empire

According to Forbes' billionaire list, as of February 8, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is one of the richest billionaires on the planet. With a net worth of $192.6 billion, he is the third richest person in the world .

In 2023, Amazon shares increased by 79%, making Jeff Bezos worth an additional $65 billion. Amazon started as a book-selling website, then gradually expanded into all industries, created a global logistics system and became a technology giant.

This billionaire's entrepreneurial story has left many people in awe. In 1994, with $1 million raised from friends and family, Bezos rented a house in the city and founded an online book business.

At that time, Amazon was considered “Earth’s Largest Bookstore” with over 1 million titles for customers to choose from. By September 1996, Amazon had over 100 employees and had a revenue of over $15.7 million.

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Jeff Bezos built the Amazon empire. (Photo: Reuters)

Over the course of 27 years, Jeff Bezos has turned Amazon into a giant. Not only has it been successful in its core business of online shopping, but the company has also made significant strides in cloud computing, entertainment, and advertising.

In 2020, the company hired 175,000 seasonal workers to meet the surge in demand caused by the pandemic. 125,000 of those workers were later offered the opportunity to stay on full-time. By September, they had added 100,000 employees in the US and Canada. In May 2021, they announced the addition of 75,000 workers.

2022 is considered a difficult and volatile year for the technology sector, including Amazon. The company's stock has fallen by 50%, becoming the first public company to lose $1 trillion in market capitalization.

Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO in July 2021 but remained chairman of the company. Bezos revealed that he left Amazon because he wanted to focus on his rocket company Blue Origin.

Ambition to conquer space

Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. The billionaire wanted to expand humanity's reach into the solar system. For many years, Blue Origin operated in near-total secrecy.

But now the goal is pretty clear. "I've transitioned the CEO role, and the main reason I did that was so I could spend time on Blue Origin, to energize it, to bring a sense of urgency," Bezos said.

As a young man, he had ambitions to conquer space. In his high school graduation speech, Bezos ended with a famous quote from the sci-fi series: "Space, the final frontier. Meet me there."

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The tech billionaire's dream of conquering space. (Photo: NYT)

He also founded Blue Origin to develop lower-cost rocket and spacecraft technologies. The company plans to build a lunar lander and work with NASA and other partners to establish a lunar base.

By 2015, Blue Origin became the first space company to successfully launch a rocket above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. The company has developed three space vehicles: New Shepard, New Glenn, and Blue Moon.

NASA has awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to build a spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the moon. The contract requires Blue Origin to make an unmanned flight to the moon, followed by a flight to bring astronauts to the planet, expected in 2029.

Lessons of success

In an interview on CNN, billionaire Jeff Bezos announced that he will spend most of his fortune to fight climate change and support those who have the ability to unite humanity.

Throughout his time as Amazon’s leader, Bezos has frequently shared his own advice and lessons learned. Bezos believes that the key to maintaining a highly innovative business is making “high-quality decisions at a high rate of speed.”

In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Mr. Bezos wrote about the importance of remaining unique.

"We all know that being different, or unique, is something that is very valuable. We're all taught to be ourselves. What I really want you to do is accept and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that difference. The world wants you to be normal in a thousand different ways... but don't let that happen," according to Jeff Bezos.

The billionaire believes that maintaining one's uniqueness is worthwhile, even though it requires "constant hard work."