Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos have been officially announced as the world’s richest person due to a hike in the share price of his company. This hike in the share price of Amazon resulted in overtaking Microsoft founder Bill Gates who was the world’s richest person until now.
The Forbes magazine estimated that after this hike Bezos has a net worth of $90.5 billion which is more than Bill Gate’s worth of $90 billion.
According to a news almost 17% of the Amazon’s equities are owned by the founder himself. Acheiving its goal as a biggest online retailer, Amazon has not only become a multifarious tech firm in cloud computing but also in online video, computing hardware and artificial intelligence as well. The company is also planning to take possesion of US grocer Whole Foods so that Amazon can expand in that sector too.
According to Forbes magazine’s annual rankings in March, Gate has been the richest person for the past four years and 18 of the past 22 years. There was even a news that fom 2010 to 2013 Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim overtook Gates .
In one of the interviews Bezos said that when he realized that internet usage was growing at 2,300 per cent per year, that day itself he decided that he can make Amazon a successful firm as he had never seen anything rising with such a ratio.
At Princeton University Jeff Bezos explained that the prospect was very exciting to him and said that: “The idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles – something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world – was very exciting to me”.Bezos even said that he was having second thoughts and doubt about the project but he cann’t let it go without giving a try.
As Amazon was launched by Bezos in 1994 and the company went public three years later after its launcing, and since then it has been increasing in size and this year the biggest online retailer in the world with a revenue of $177.87 billion has achieved 8th place in the Fortune 500 list.
Besides all this Amazon is looking forward on its growth with some new missions and numerous other goals to achieve. Infact the company has recently struck a deal with the English Premier League to stream matches using Amazon Prime after acquiring Whole Foods last year.
Apart from all this, Bezos’ success came up with some controversies surrounded by the treatment and pay of his employees.