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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Becomes World's Third Richest Person (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Strong earnings from Amazon and a boost to the company's stock have made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the world's third richest person, according to Forbes. Mr Bezos owns 18% of Amazon's shares, which rose 2% in trading on Thursday. Forbes estimated his fortune to be $65.3 billion (49.5 billion British Pound). Amazon's revenue beat analysts' expectations, climbing 31% from last year to $30.4 billion in the second quarter. Profit for the e-commerce giant was $857 million, compared with $92 million in 2015. According to Forbes estimates, Mr Bezos's fortune is only surpassed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, worth $78 billion (59 billion British Pound), and the $73.1 billion (55 billion British Pound) fortune of Zara founder Amancio Ortega. Amazon had developed a reputation for announcing little or no profit each quarter, but appeared to hit a turning point last year and has seen improving earnings since. Amazon shares have spiked 50% since February. BBC's report includes some bullet points about Bezos. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. He studied at Princeton University and worked on Wall Street. In 1994, he launched Amazon as an online book retailer. A lifelong Star Trek fan, Bezos launched Blue Origin spaceflight and aerospace firm in 2000, and more than a decade later, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper in 2013.

67 comments

  1. Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    When you're worth that much why not just cash out, what's the point of earning more. I can't understand why anyone would be doing anything other than coke and hookers after 1b

    1. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wtf is zara?

    2. Re: Why not cash out? by prograsm · · Score: 2

      Big clothing chain in Spain. It's clothes are mostly plain.

    3. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... I can't understand why anyone would be doing anything other than coke and hookers after 1b

      You obviously haven't seen his wife...

    4. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because then he'd really have actual "money problems" such as finding some Scrooge mcduck like bank fortress structure large enough to store all that fucking money.

    5. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because nearly all of that "net worth" is tied up in his company stock. He's only rich on paper.

    6. Re:Why not cash out? by wyHunter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because he doesn't want money, he wants power,to set public policy.

    7. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because he doesn't want money, he wants power,to buy presidential elections.

      There, FTFY

    8. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      His wife is average with bad teeth. What's your point?

    9. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless his wife is hundreds of attractive women or some mutant like Mystique from x-men then i dont think it matters

    10. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They are known for applying just-in-time manufacturing to clothing. To create or catch trends, their designs are made in 1-2 days and produced by a series of contractors (mostly sweatshops) a few days later. This approach means they can release new clothing lines in weeks were other retailers do only 4 seasonal updates a year.

    11. Re:Why not cash out? by quantaman · · Score: 1

      When you're worth that much why not just cash out, what's the point of earning more. I can't understand why anyone would be doing anything other than coke and hookers after 1b

      People spend their money doing things they like.

      He apparently likes running Amazon.

      --
      I stole this Sig
    12. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With all that money why would you not build that . Just replace mercer island with a bezos vault full of quarters.

    13. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because he doesn't want money, he wants power,to buy presidents.

      There, FTFY

    14. Re:Why not cash out? by penguinoid · · Score: 1

      Because the sort of person who would quit working after they got enough money, wouldn't continue past even one million.

      --
      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    15. Re:Why not cash out? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Because nearly all of that "net worth" is tied up in his company stock. He's only rich on paper.

      He can sell the stock anytime he wants. He has already sold plenty, and has billions in diversified assets.

      He doesn't cash out because he finds pleasure in DOING STUFF rather than sitting on a beach. I once took a two week vacation to Hawaii, and after the first week I was already bored, and thinking about potential new projects, and I have way less than $63B.

    16. Re:Why not cash out? by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 1

      At some point the question you ask yourself changes from "How much more money do I need?" into "What if the guy putting at the next hole has more cash than I do?"

    17. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is plenty of stuff in the world that needs doing, q.v. Bill Gates' efforts, so no reason to be bored.

    18. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *its

    19. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought this. But I think if you're the type of person that will cash-out at 10M, 100M, 1B, whatever, you're the type of person that's not going to make that in the first place...

    20. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For the love URL's someone give this karma.

    21. Re: Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You must have a really sucky sex life if you think that is what it takes to have a good one.

    22. Re:Why not cash out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because nearly all of that "net worth" is tied up in his company stock. He's only rich on paper.

      He can sell the stock anytime he wants. He has already sold plenty, and has billions in diversified assets.

      He doesn't cash out because he finds pleasure in DOING STUFF rather than sitting on a beach. I once took a two week vacation to Hawaii, and after the first week I was already bored, and thinking about potential new projects, and I have way less than $63B.

      Must be nice when you can pay people to handle the mundane aspects. I think OP is more wondering why Bezos doesn't do whatever he wants with his fortune while stepping aside and giving someone else a chance at the helm of Amazon. The answer should be obvious, ego, pride, normal, basic human aspects.

  2. You really mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    his Wife is the third richest person...

  3. Amazon.com has trashy web pages. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apparently all rich people are abusive. Look at almost any Amazon web page. The pages try to distract visitors with other things to buy when they are trying to discover more about the product they picked.

    There seems to be NO quality control. Amazon often advertises low prices with extremely high shipping cost.

    Would you fly into space with someone who accepts such craziness?

    1. Re:Amazon.com has trashy web pages. by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

      I thought it was rather surprising that that Rothchild bozo (you know, one of the planet's owners) was not at the top of the list for richest person.

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
    2. Re:Amazon.com has trashy web pages. by un1nsp1red · · Score: 1

      Stuart Mackenzie: Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as The Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.

      Tony Giardino: So who's in this Pentavirate?

      Stuart Mackenzie: The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, *and* Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee *beady* eyes, and that smug look on his face. "Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!"

  4. Har har he has more than trump by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    how does that feel mr trump to not just have so tiny tiny fingers, but to be also poorer than jeff bezos??

    1. Re:Har har he has more than trump by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how does that feel mr trump to not just have so tiny tiny fingers, but to be also poorer than jeff bezos??

      Trump has a hotter wife

  5. Richest Third-World Person? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So who is the richest person in the third-world?

    1. Re: Richest Third-World Person? by afidel · · Score: 1

      The telecom guy from Mexico, that or the house of Saud.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re: Richest Third-World Person? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hate to break this to you, but Mexico is first world.

    3. Re: Richest Third-World Person? by afidel · · Score: 1

      No, they're not. By definition the first world was the US and their post-WW2 allies, 2nd world was the communist bloc, and third world was everyone else, which included Mexico.

      If you were thinking about developed vs developing vs underdeveloped they're classified as a developing country, they'd likely be a developed country if they hadn't lost control of major parts of the country to the narco-state.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  6. Keep in mind.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This doesn't include several members such as the British Royal Family and the Rothschild.

    1. Re:Keep in mind.. by FlacoFuerte · · Score: 1

      For that matter various despots and oligarchs that have their dough hidden in various ways and/or use state funds as their personal piggy banks. See House of Saud, Putin, the Khalifas, Mubarak and so on.

  7. Re:Bullet points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Bullet points are interesting."

    Not really when they're slanted by an agenda to tarnish a prominent pro-Trump tech tycoon by comparison. At least you didn't even try to hide it while you sandwiched Thiel between two ultra lefties and their rose tinted achievements.

  8. most Attractive, too by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

    According to a Washington Post article from yesterday, he is also the most physically and sexually attractive of all of the "10 richest people" of the last 50 years.

  9. Nevermind that he's nuts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This idea of pushing drone tech to its inevitable unavoidable overlord conclusion... it's pretty much mad scientist type shit, really. Human beings with mortgages, ha! Let their screams be muted by robotic whirring sounds.

  10. Re:Bullet points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seasteading is Libertarian bullshit.

    By the way I don't mean "It's libertarian therefore it's bullshit" - it's just both. It can't work, but people do pour a lot of (usually other people's) money into failing to do anything about that.

    Take a normal Libertarian plan to build a new city / district / country with its own rules where Libertarianism can really show what is possible. They're generally an enormous confidence trick. You think you're buying a house with land to farm, you get an expensive chunk of swamp or desert or some other uninhabitable hellhole. You're told you'll have all the essentials but they forget to mention, oops, there's no water, or no power, or no sewage treatment. They'll get it in, that costs extra. Very often there's a nice sketch of dwellings and businesses, but oops, nobody mentioned that actually they sold you land that's not authorised for building anything, so, if you want a house on the land you bought thinking it came with a house, first you need to fight an expensive lawsuit against people who do this for a living, to demand the right to build something that in the small print it said you weren't entitled to build...

    OK, but now instead of a useless land in the middle of nowhere, the Seasteadders sell you a hypothetical cabin on a boat that doesn't exist. It's scam squared.

  11. Asshole by DaMattster · · Score: 2, Informative

    He didn't accumulate that mass of wealth by being a good and decent human being. Look at the way his company treats its rank and file employees. I don't care how much money he has, Jeff Bezos has absolutely nothing redeeming about him

    1. Re:Asshole by quantaman · · Score: 1

      He didn't accumulate that mass of wealth by being a good and decent human being. Look at the way his company treats its rank and file employees. I don't care how much money he has, Jeff Bezos has absolutely nothing redeeming about him

      Amazon is a retailer, a traditionally low margin industry. For the same reason you don't expect clean athletes you don't expect kind and generous CEOs in low margin industries.

      --
      I stole this Sig
    2. Re:Asshole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      a traditionally low margin industry.

      How exactly is Amazon making low margins? They must have an order of magnitude less expenses than the typical brick-and-mortar retailer. Instead of expensive real estate for a shop, they have cheap warehouses (which they probably own, so no rent). Instead of salespeople, they have a website doing the selling (and the website costs millions of times less than hiring humans to do the selling). They reinvest all their profits into expanding into new markets: first books -> other stuff -> web hosting, cloud etc, so they have to pay little or no taxes.

      Despite all the cost savings, Amazon prices are usually the same as any other retailer. Sure, you get a discount on some products now and then, but the remaining products retain the same price to try to propel Bezos towards the second or first richest man in the world.

    3. Re:Asshole by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      How exactly is Amazon making low margins?

      Amazon is a public company. They are required to publish their financial statements. Their margins are public information, and are very low. Amazon has pursued a strategy of low prices and low margins in order to build market share. That strategy seems to be working well, leading to a high stock price.

    4. Re:Asshole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunately you are preaching your facts and logic to a crowd more willing to listen to shrieks and squawks.

    5. Re:Asshole by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 1

      Where exactly is GP doing that? Why does he not mention Amazon's margin, and compare with lets say Costco? Where are the facts and logic you are talking about?

      Why exactly is Amazon forced to keep unreasonably low margin and stiff its employees?

    6. Re:Asshole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Why exactly is Amazon forced to keep unreasonably low margin and stiff its employees?

      It's not forced to.

      But their plan appears to be:

      1) drive everyone else out of business by undercutting them with low margins
      2) maximise what they can make (or minimise what they lose) by stiffing employees
      3) ....
      4) profit

    7. Re:Asshole by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Why exactly is Amazon forced to keep unreasonably low margin and stiff its employees?

      If Jeff Bezos had high prices and paid his employees generously, he would be the proprietor of a corner grocery store rather than the 3rd richest guy on the planet.

    8. Re:Asshole by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 1

      Costco owner is technically the proprietor of a corner grocery store, it is just bigger. He is happy to have not stiffed his employees (I dont think he would happier as the third richest man, than he is now), and the employees are happy for it.

  12. Scary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What's scary is this election cycle. There are a lot of billionares tossing around Trump. Trump is worth a couple billion dollars, and he's still being tossed around. Think of what those billionares could do to an ordinary Joe Schmoe.

  13. Re:Bullet points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Take a normal Libertarian plan to build a new city / district / country with its own rules where Libertarianism can really show what is possible.

    Would you kindly move to Rapture?

  14. Never Thought Amazon Would Work by KermodeBear · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When Amazon was just starting out, I thought, "Why would someone want to buy books online? It's so much better to go to a book store, you can see the books, thumb through them, see what you're getting before you put any money down, etc."

    When YouTube launched I thought, "Who the hell wants to watch stupid cat videos?"

    When Twitter launched I thought, "140 characters? That'll never take off..."

    I'm reeeeeeally bad at predicting things, obviously... (o:

    --
    Love sees no species.
    1. Re:Never Thought Amazon Would Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The thing about YouTube is that it was joining an already overcrowded space. We already had 300 variations of ebaumsworld, why did we need another? It only "won" because of a combination of funding (the other sites were mostly small potatoes that probably never even considered venture capital) and the super clean interface, a la Google.

    2. Re:Never Thought Amazon Would Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nope, you are actually really good at predicting stuff.
      Negate your future predictions and you are good to go.

    3. Re:Never Thought Amazon Would Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know you are being funny here....

      Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter are outliers. If you looked at all you predictions you probably have a pretty good hit rate.

    4. Re:Never Thought Amazon Would Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Successful companies in general are outliers. You'd do pretty well by not even looking at their concepts and simply repeating the same negative prediction.

  15. What was and what is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great people talk about ideas.

    Average people talk about things.

    Small people talk about other people.

    The evolution of slashdot

  16. Normalize to a normal P/E by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    $65B mostly based on owning a stock with P/E of 300.

    If you put a more normal 15X multiple on such a stock, his wealth shrinks to a paltry ~$3.2B or so.

    Not too shabby, but Amazon of course faces some real issues if they had to operate with a reasonable multiple on their stock. They couldn't pay their employees in stock, for example without shareholders worrying of dilution.

    1. Re: Normalize to a normal P/E by afidel · · Score: 1

      Yeah, except they're twice the size of Target and revenue is still growing at 20+% per year so the multiple is probably justified. If they can keep it up they'll surpass Walmart in under 10 year and then they can stop putting capital into growth and really start making money. Imagine if Walmart could throw off 10-15% instead of 2.5%h

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  17. Re:Bullet points by sittingnut · · Score: 1

    parent is clearly not offtopic(-1). ?*#&!
    -
      i would upvote if i had any points, didn't get any for months even though i had 'excellent' karma throughout and is active.

  18. How Much Money Do You Need? by Greyfox · · Score: 1

    Seems to me there must be a sum of money upon which you could live comfortably for the rest of your life. Around 8 or 10 million, you could probably make more on interest and investment income than most Americans do, and why go for more after that? But I suppose that's why he's a billionaire and I'm not. I'm pretty happy just doing what I'm doing. I wonder if he is. As Sarah Silverman says, all the penises in the world won't fill the hole in your heart.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:How Much Money Do You Need? by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 1

      The summary mentions Bezos is a Trekkie. He wants his own space program. Those are not cheap. Pretty much all the people doing that (Musk, Allen, Bezos, Branson, Bigelow, Henri of Luxembourg, and the investors in Planetary Resources) are billionaires.

    2. Re:How Much Money Do You Need? by neminem · · Score: 1

      There's "comfortably", and then there's "in style". I'm a big fan of the subreddit /r/financialindependence, which is about retiring early, and it's actually surprisingly (semi)-easy - your estimates are way too high. With really just a couple million, you could live off that pretty indefinitely if you did it smart. But while there's certainly diminishing returns after that, I'd say it tapers off pretty slowly - while being able to retire early at all is the biggest thing, I could easily increase my enjoyment of my retirement by splurging more and more, based on how much money I had, up to a point. Total rough ballpark, I don't think diminishing returns would start to make additional money *totally* pointless until probably around the 100m mark or so.

      But yes, definitely at *some* point more money is irrelevant, regardless of specifically what point that is, if you're just talking about personal enjoyment of life. Jeff Bezos, however, probably thinks way bigger than that, or Amazon wouldn't have become such a monstrously enormous company in such a relatively short period of time.

  19. Why not British pounds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why not British pounds? It's a plural.

  20. In other news... by ausekilis · · Score: 1

    Larry Ellison, whose biggest goal is to have more money than god, decides to raise the price of all Oracle products. Rumors of Mr. Ellison grumbling "gotta catch up with Bezos" through the hallways of Oracle have been spreading.

    /snark