Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos overtook Bill Gates and became the richest man in the world according to Forbes, with a fortune of over $ 90 billion for the first time. The Forbes publication began tracking the status of billionaires around the world in 1987. Bezos was the seventh person to hold the title of the richest in the world, and the third American to lead a global corporation in addition to Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet.
Gates and Buffett appeared in the first Forbes 400 ranking of the richest people in 1982, and Bezos appeared in 1998 with a fortune of $ 1.6 billion, a year after Amazon became a public company. In the Forbes March 2017 ranking, Jeff Bezos ranked third in the world among billionaires with a fortune of $ 72.8 billion.
Perhaps Bezos could not have become the richest man in the world if Gates had not donated huge amounts to charity as part of the “ Oath of Giving ” philanthropic campaign he and Buffett had created : during his life at the end of 2016, Gates had given 32.9 billion dollars. According to Forbes, at the end of 2015, Bezos gave 100 million dollars to charity.
Jeff Bezos studied at Princeton and worked in a hedge fund before he launched an online book-selling platform in his garage in Seattle in 1994. Since then, Amazon has grown into a comprehensive corporation offering a wide range of products and services. The division of Amazon Web Services also offers cloud services, while Bezos himself, working on managing the core business, is working on the development of the aerospace company Blue Origin and the Washington Post publication.
Gates' fortune was built thanks to Microsoft’s creation of 1975 by him and his friend Paul Allen. Gates sold most of his stake in the company, but still owns a 2% stake worth about $ 12.4 billion - a little less than 14% of his total wealth. Investment company Cascade Investments has distributed Bill Gates money to a variety of assets, including state stocks, real estate, private equity and venture capital. Founder of Microsoft owns shares in the Canadian National Railway, the manufacturer of cosmetics Ecolab and the Mexican company Femsa .