How much is Jeff Bezos worth?

Jeff Bezos' substantial stock holdings in Amazon are the source of his wealth

We examine how he built the largest online retailer in the world and his ventures into media, space exploration, and the James Bond film series.

One of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, Jeff Bezos is the industry leader in online retail. The founder of Amazon has a net worth of £233 billion, which puts him behind Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. His wealth, however, is £227.4 billion, according to Forbes.

He is frequently listed as one of the most successful individuals in the world and is well-known for having founded the massive online retailer Amazon. According to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index, Bezos was the first centibillionaire.

The process by which he turned an online bookshop into a 1.809 trillion market capitalization empire is unclear.

We look at the main drivers of Jeff Bezos' wealth growth and his current position among the tech industry titans.

How was Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos?

Bezos, who was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, demonstrated an early talent for entrepreneurship. He founded educational summer camps as a teenager, instructing local kids in science and engineering. After that, he attended Princeton University to study electrical engineering and computer science, where he graduated with honors.

Bezos held a number of positions following graduation, including those of product manager at Bankers Trust and computer engineer for a telecom company. But he didn't really find his footing until 1994, when he started Amazon.com.

Online shopping was practically unheard of at the time, as the internet was still in its early stages of development. Bezos planned to establish an online bookstore that would transform the way people shop for books after spotting a chance to profit from this emerging market.

At first, the business was operated by a small group of people out of his garage. However, with astute marketing and a dedication to customer support, Amazon started to expand rapidly. He was successful in persuading Mark and Christina, his siblings, to contribute £10,000 apiece to the business in 1995. Their investment was repaid, and the business was selling books to clients all over the world in less than a year. At £18 per share, Amazon's stock made its debut through an IPO in 1997. Overnight, it turned Bezos into a billionaire.

Bezos wasn't satisfied with his success. He kept adding music, movies, and eventually almost anything else he could think of to Amazon's selection. Amazon is currently the biggest online retailer in the world. The business was in charge of launching the electronic book reader known as the Kindle in 2007.

After resigning as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Jeff Bezos has begun concentrating on his other lucrative ventures.

Approximately 8:8% of Amazon is owned by Bezos, according to a November 2024 company filing, following the sale of shares valued at £214 million. As a result of this deal, he now owns about 926 million shares of the massive online retailer.

Other elements that affect Jeff Bezos' wealth.

Bezos' net worth has increased as a result of his numerous acquisitions and investments in addition to his success with Amazon.

In 2013, he paid £250 million to acquire one of the biggest newspapers in the US, The Washington Post. It was the most popular website for The New York Times in October 2015, according to Digiday. However, after declining to support a candidate in the 2024 US presidential election, the website reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers in October 2024, or about 10% of its original following.

In 2000, Bezos founded the space exploration firm Blue Origin, in which he also owns a sizable stake. Bezos was on board the company's first crewed space flight, which ascended to 66,5 miles, just above the 62-mile internationally accepted boundary.

During the 33rd Space Symposium in 2017, Bezos stated: "At the moment, I sell roughly £1 billion worth of Amazon stock annually and use the proceeds to invest in Blue Origin. According to Bloomberg, he has sold about £42 billion worth of Amazon stock since 2002 in order to finance the business.

His portfolio also consists of investments in software company Nextdoor, cloud human resources firm Workday, financial news website Business Insider, Uber, and Airbnb.

According to Architectural Digest, Bezos owns a sizable real estate portfolio that includes properties in the US valued at over £500 million. One of these is a historic Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, valued at £165 million.

More recently, Bezos also spent about £500 million on the 2023 launch of the superyacht Koru.

During his lifetime, Bezos has promised to donate the majority of his fortune to charitable causes. He distributed £117 million in grants to help homeless families in the US and Puerto Rico, and he pledged £10 billion to combat climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund.

Is the James Bond franchise now owned by Amazon?

Amazon announced a significant reorganization on February 20th, revealing that it had assumed creative control of the venerable 007 franchise. This follows the e-commerce behemoth's acquisition of MGM, which shares the series' rights with Eon, in 2021 for £8.5 billion.

Due to Amazon's recent agreement with Eon, the intellectual property associated with the James Bond series is now jointly owned by Amazon MGM Studios and Eon Productions. Bezos asked his followers on X (formerly Twitter) who they would like to see as the next James Bond shortly after the announcement.

Who do you think should be the next Bond? February 20, 2025, pic . twitter . com/u7nBaRROlf.