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.

Comments

Why not cash out?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Why not cash out?

[prograsm]

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

Re:Why not cash out?

[wyHunter]

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

Re: Why not cash out?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why not cash out?

[quantaman]

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.

Re:Why not cash out?

[penguinoid]

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

Re:Why not cash out?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Why not cash out?

[MillionthMonkey]

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?"

Re:Amazon.com has trashy web pages.

[Scarletdown]

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.

most Attractive, too

[Sir Holo]

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.

Asshole

[DaMattster]

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

Re:Asshole

[quantaman]

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.

Re:Asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Asshole

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Asshole

[ThatsMyNick]

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?

Re:Asshole

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Asshole

[ThatsMyNick]

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.

Re:Amazon.com has trashy web pages.

[un1nsp1red]

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!"

Re:Keep in mind..

[FlacoFuerte]

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.

Never Thought Amazon Would Work

[KermodeBear]

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:

Re: Richest Third-World Person?

[afidel]

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

Re: Normalize to a normal P/E

[afidel]

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

Re:Bullet points

[sittingnut]

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.

How Much Money Do You Need?

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:How Much Money Do You Need?

[DanielRavenNest]

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.

Re:How Much Money Do You Need?

[neminem]

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.

In other news...

[ausekilis]

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

Re: Richest Third-World Person?

[afidel]

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.