Jeff Bezos is officially the richest person on the planet thanks to the success of Amazon.
With Amazon’s share price up nearly 60 percent during the past year, the personal wealth of the company’s 54-year-old founder has doubled to more than $110 billion. Bezos leapt past Bill Gates, relegating the Microsoft co-founder to second place with a net worth of about $90 billion.
Who is Jeff Bezos?
Bezos studied engineering at Princeton University. He was interested in computer science when the IT industry was just beginning. After graduating he worked on Wall Street, whereby 1990 he had risen to be a senior vice president at investment firm D.E. Shaw. He left a high-paid position about four years later to open an online bookseller called Amazon.com, which according to legend was started in a garage. Amazon is now worth about $750 billion based on the price of its shares on Thursday.