Jeff Bezos is swimming in, sleeping in, eating and breathing cash dollar 24/7, 365 days a year.

Now, thanks to a recent bump in his fortune, he’s comfortably the richest person alive.

The Amazon CEO’s fortunes crossed the $150 billion mark this week – that’s a gargantuan R1,9 trillion fortune he’s got tucked away in his bank vaults, folks.

This was due to a $60 billion (R799 billion) jump in shares on Amazon’s Prime Day sale, the annual event when the retailer cuts prices on a range of products to boost sales.

The Telegraph has more:

The figure finally saw him overtake Gates’ 1999 fortune when adjusted for inflation. At the peak of the dotcom boom, Gates was worth $100bn [R1,3 trillion] – or $149bn [R1,9 trillion] in today’s money – a level that Bezos has only just surpassed. The 54-year-old Bezos currently owns a stake of over 16pc in e-commerce giant Amazon, which he founded as a book store in a garage in Seattle in 1994.

The Amazon shareholding represents the bulk of his fortune but Bezos’ portfolio and business interests are more wide-ranging. They have included shares in Uber, Airbnb, financial news website Business Insider and healthcare business Zocdoc, according to Crunchbase.

He is also the owner of The Washington Post, a newspaper which he bought in 2013, and he founded spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000. He also bought an early stake into Google worth $250 000 (over R3 million) back in 1998.

Sherbet. Bezos has come a loooong way from flipping burgers at McDonalds in the ’70s, where he first got a taste of working life.

Now look at him – he’s beaten Bill bloody Gates and eight other well-known faces in the richest person department.

Take a squizz at this graph for comparison:

Larry Ellison, my dude, you’ve got some catching up to do.

This probably comes as a double blow for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who just got unseated by Kylie Jenner of all people as the youngest ‘self-made’ billionaire a few days back.

From a modern point of view, Bezos reigns supreme. However, the report reckons that he’d still fall short of some historical well-off men, if their fortunes were adjusted for inflation:

The vast riches of US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller … would dwarf Bezos, according to some estimates. Rockefeller, who died in 1937, would be worth $363bn [R4,8 trillion] today.

When taking into account the entirety of history, Roman Emperor Augustus would be high on the list with $3 trillion [R39 trillion]. This estimate, which is hard to prove in today’s standards, was based on Rome accounting for around 20-30 pc of the world’s economic output during his life.

Lucky for Bezos, these dudes aren’t around anymore to gloat in his face.

We’ve got to hand it to him, though: he turned a small, book-selling online site into an e-commerce empire over the course of 24 years. From branching out to selling electronics and food to streaming music, the man has got it made.

He’s got his magic formula to thank for that:

Despite Amazon’s success, Bezos has famously abided by three startup principles: the two-pizza rule, which meant that no meeting should ever have more people in it than could eat two pizzas; no bullet points, meaning all PowerPoint presentations are banned; and to avoid the obsession over profit, as he felt that building scale in the business is more important than shareholder returns.

Wise rules right there.

Now that he’s dabbling in philanthropy, environmental projects, and building a big-ass R495 million clock in Texas, it’s safe to say that Bezos can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants.

If you think otherwise, all those zeros in his fortune would like to have a word with you.

Read the full article on Bezos’ success here.

[source:telegraph]