Jeff Bezos at 56: from castrating bulls to founding Amazon, and from divorce to new girlfriend Lauren Sanchez – the incredible life of the world’s richest person
The year 2019 began with a rocky start for the world’s richest person – but peaked with jet-setting, romance, and celebrating Prime Day with Katy Perry and Lil Nas X
The founder and CEO of Amazon, who incorporated the company in 1994, has had a tumultuous year – this time in 2019, he was in the process of a divorce and had just had his personal messages leaked by the National Enquirer.
In 2017, Bezos hit a milestone after his net worth hit US$150 billion – making him the richest person in modern history, as Bloomberg put it. His net worth is now about US$118 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. And in late 2018, Amazon briefly became the second US company after Apple to achieve a valuation of more than US$1 trillion (though its market cap has since sunk below that threshold).
I knew that I might sincerely regret not having took part in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionising event
That success hasn't come overnight, however. Bezos began his career in the hedge fund world in the 90s, then left a cushy job to launch his own start-up.
Here's how Bezos got his start, and built one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Jeff Bezos' mother, Jackie, was a teenager when she gave birth to him on January 12, 1964. She had recently married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who adopted Jeff. Jeff didn't learn that Miguel wasn't his real father until he was 10, but says he was more fazed about learning he needed to get glasses than he was about the news.
When Bezos was aged four, his mother told his biological father, who previously had worked as a circus performer, to stay out of their lives. When Brad Stone interviewed Bezos' biological father for his book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos' dad had no idea who his son had become.
Bezos showed signs of brilliance from an early age. When he was a toddler, he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed.
From ages four to 16, Bezos spent summers on his grandparents' ranch in Texas, doing things like repairing windmills and castrating bulls.