Move over Bill Gates.
It’s official, as of today Jeff Bezos is the richest person of all time, after his net worth reached $105.1 billion (£77.75bn) yesterday.
The news has been reported by Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker, although it should be noted that Forbes put Bezos’ net worth at a merger $104.4 billion (£77.23bn).
Most of Bezos’ vast wealth comes from the 78.9 million shares of Amazon stock he owns. They climbed 1.4% yesterday and added around $1.4 billion (£1.04bn) to his net worth.
1999: Jeff Bezos sitting at his desk at “Amazon HQ.”
2018: Amazon has over 500,000 employees and has a market value of $571 billion, while Bezos now ranks number one on the Bloomberg index of richest people on earth, surpassing the $100 billion mark. pic.twitter.com/0tEYCWFWmC
— Yoni (@OriginalYoni) January 4, 2018
Although he’s most famous for founding Amazon, like most billionaires he has his fingers in a number of pies. His other holdings include the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a private space travel business.
And, despite being the most flush person to ever live, according to the man himself he didn’t found Amazon purely to get rich.
“I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this,” he said in an oft-quoted interview a few years ago.
“I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that.
“But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”
So the main reason he became an entrepreneur – and resultantly the richest man alive – was FOMO. Sad really, all that’s done for most of us is cause us to regret not going to the pub.
