Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is one of the most recognizable members of an uber-wealthy global elite. As the owner of the Washington Post since 2013, he is also a frequent target of critics on both sides of the American political divide.
Like many of the world's most fabulously wealthy, Bezos' path to riches was greased with family wealth — but it was Bezos' vision that turned an online hub for used books in the early internet era into a world-best market hegemony powerful enough to muscle out competition in virtually any field over the course of 30 years. In large part because Amazon delivery trucks are a ubiquitous presence on America's streets, Bezos has since accumulated enough wealth to be richer than many of the world's countries.
How did he amass his fortune?
Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. After college, Bezos went to work for a financial technology startup, Fitel, before moving to banking and then to the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1990, where he was "tasked with researching potential business opportunities involving the then brand-new internet landscape," said CNBC. There, he would show "many of the idiosyncratic qualities his employees would later observe at Amazon," including "constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him," said Brad Stone in an excerpt from his 2013 book "The Everything Store."
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Bezos and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, left the hedge fund to start the organization that would become Amazon in 1994, initially operating it out of a Seattle garage. Originally called "Cadabra," the name "later changed because it sounded too much like "cadaver," or a dead human body used for research," said Yahoo. Amazon.com was launched in 1995 as an online bookseller and a year later it was considered one of the "well-established internet shops" pressuring brick-and-mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble as well as smaller, independent bookstores, said The New York Times in 1996. Amazon "survived early prophecies of doom" and eventually "branched out into selling music, movies, electronics and toys during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s." The company struggled through, but ultimately survived, the e-commerce crash of the early 2000s.
Bezos took the firm public in 1997, and due to a rapid increase in the company's value, he "appeared on Forbes list of America's 400 wealthiest people for the first time in 1998," said Yahoo Finance, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion at the time. He would never again fall out of the exclusive billionaire club. Yet Amazon itself would not develop into the market-dominating behemoth it is today until much later. As late as 2004, it was "still mostly selling just books and DVDs," even as it was "under siege from multiple sides" including retailers like Best Buy, said Vox. That is when Bezos' firm launched the company's Prime subscription service, a "$79-a-year loyalty program that includes free two-day shipping on any order," said CNN. The yearly subscription fee kept shoppers in the Amazon universe, and eventually made making purchases on the site so easy as to be near-seamless. Today, "75% of Americans now use Amazon Prime, a record level of penetration," said Business Insider.
Over the years, Amazon continued to add innovative new products that disrupted existing industries, including the Kindle, a digital reader that "dominated every corner of the ebook industry" and today "might as well be synonymous with ebook, with its massive reach that accounts for 68% of overall" market for electronic book sales, said Book Riot. But it is Amazon's dominance of the global package shipping market, driven by Prime subscribers, that has made Bezos one of the richest people in history. Bezos "built the sprawling logistics and delivery empire" necessary "for many of us to buy almost anything we want with a click," said Vox. The company's labor practices and market dominance have been the target of regulatory investigations. Conditions in the company's warehouses have also drawn "scrutiny from government officials, labor groups and workers over high injury rates for the past several years," said The Guardian. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2024 Amazon argued in a legal filing "that the "National Labor Relations Board was unconstitutional," said The New York Times.
Amazon's global network of warehouses, fulfillment centers and delivery services "is the envy of, and inspiration for, Amazon's business partners and competitors," said Vox. Amazon is also one of the largest private employers in the country and in February 2025 "dethroned Walmart in quarterly revenue for the first time ever," said CNBC. Amazon's market cap is an astonishing $2.36 trillion, according to Forbes.
Branching out to space, finance and journalism
As his Amazon empire grew larger and larger, Bezos became involved with a variety of other ventures. In 2005, he created Bezos Expeditions, a venture capital and investment fund "through which he owns stakes in many companies including space-transportation startup Blue Origin," said The Wall Street Journal. In 2013, he bought the Washington Post for $250 million in cash, a maneuver which "stunned the media industry and sent shockwaves around Washington D.C.," said Politico. Bezos promised staff "that his ownership would bring no radical change to the paper's core values." In 2017, after Donald Trump's first presidential victory, Bezos added "Democracy Dies in Darkness," a "dramatic and alliterative phrase," beneath the paper's digital masthead, said the Post. The paper "lost $77 million" in 2023 and has "seen a dramatic 50% drop in audience since the highs of 2020," said CNN. In 2024, Bezos pulled the paper's endorsement of Kamala Harris, triggering an exodus of tens of thousands of subscribers as well as a number of staff.
Bezos' net worth took a hit from one of the world's most expensive divorces. In 2019, he and MacKenzie Scott announced that they were splitting. As part of the settlement, "Bezos handed Scott a 4% stake in Amazon, transferring a total of $38 billion in shares into her name," said the Independent. Bezos was, at the time, the world's richest man, and even shaving $38 billion off of his fortune left him with $119 billion. It would not be long before the external shock of a global pandemic helped his fortune recover.
The Covid-19 pandemic "disproportionately padded the wealth of the richest," including Bezos, said The Guardian. As the demand for delivery services skyrocketed during the acute phase of the pandemic, Amazon's value soared, as did Bezos' net worth. Amazon's stock price went from just under $91 a share on February 28, 2020 to more than $173 a share in mid-October of 2020. Bezos' net worth jumped to more than $200 billion in 2021 but marginally declined to $196 billion by March 2024, said Yahoo Finance. That still made him the second-richest person in the world. Forbes, on the other hand, pegs his net worth at $233.1 billion as of February 21, 2025, which ranks him third on the list of the world's wealthiest people, with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg taking second place.
