2018 will go down in history as the year of tech scandals.

Over the course of the year, some of the biggest names in tech were making headlines, not just for innovation, but for some seriously shady behaviour.

Elon Musk couldn’t stay away from Twitter, causing Tesla stocks to rollercoaster their way through the year, and there’s now irrefutable proof that Facebook really is the toilet we all knew it was.

One man managed to rise above it all, though, even after a robot in one of his warehouses put 24 people in hospital.

Here’s Business Insider:

In a year when the biggest names in tech were embroiled in scandals, there’s at least one executive who managed to get out of 2018 unscathed: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who saw his net worth increase by more than any of his billionaire peers.

Bezos claimed the title of world’s richest person at the beginning of the year and unseated the Microsoft founder Bill Gates from his 24-year streak at the top of Forbes’ ranking of the richest Americans. Now the Amazon CEO can say he increased his wealth in 2018 – by $24 billion, to be exact – by more than any of the richest 500 people in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Bezos managed to finish off the year with a net worth of $123 billion and that isn’t even his peak net worth. In the middle of the year, he managed to surpass a net worth of $150 billion to become the richest man ever in modern history.

To put that in perspective, Bezos makes almost $4.5 million in a single hour. With that wealth, spending $88,000 to him is like an average American spending $1, Business Insider calculated.

On second thought, don’t put that into perspective. It’ll do your head in, especially because Bezos isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

Amazon’s expansion into cloud computing, pharmaceuticals, and other industries will continue into 2019.

Rounding out the top five billionaires on Bloomberg’s ranking are Gates ($90 billion), the investor Warren Buffett ($82.9 billion), the CEO of LVMH, Bernard Arnault ($67.3 billion), and the Spanish fashion executive Amancio Ortega ($58.7 billion).

Interested in how Bezos got where he is? It could have something to do with what he was like as a kid.

Avoiding scandals is also, generally, a good way to stay on top.

[source:businessinsider]