Rockets, parties and a mega yacht – since he left the CEO position at Amazon, Jeff Bezos has been showing other tech entrepreneurs how to have fun with billions. He turns 60 on Friday.
At 30, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in a garage, and at 60 he is fully enjoying the fruits of the company’s rise from a small Internet bookseller to an online giant. Bezos is involved in the space race of billionaires, spends time on a mega sailing yacht with his fiancée Lauren Sanchez and has been a newspaper owner for over ten years with the purchase of the Washington Post.
Before his 60th birthday on Friday, Bezos is in second place in the billionaire rankings of the financial service Bloomberg with an estimated fortune of 176 billion US dollars (161 billion euros).
Tesla boss Elon Musk. Both make their wealth mainly through their stock holdings – so their assets fluctuate daily with the stock market prices. And if the super-rich want to spend money, they have to sell securities or take out loans. Meanwhile, Amazon – like other tech companies – has cut thousands of jobs in recent years.
Bezos announced that he would donate virtually his entire fortune during his lifetime. Meanwhile, the man who once had removed doors converted into desks found joy in spending money. The yacht “Koru”, built in the Netherlands, is said to have cost around half a billion dollars. Bezos bought the estate of legendary Hollywood great Jack Warner in Beverly Hills for $165 million. Bezos moved his main residence from rainy Seattle to sunny Florida – to be closer to his parents and the launch pads of his space company Blue Origin, it was said.
And unlike the vast majority of tech entrepreneurs, Bezos moves effortlessly in the world of celebrity glamor. The 54-year-old Sanchez told the fashion magazine “Vogue” about the marriage proposal on board the “Koru” last year. There you could also read about the engagement party with Barbra Streisand and Salma Hayek Pinault, among others.
Farewell to Amazon
Bezos left the top job at Amazon in the summer of 2021. A year earlier, it became clear at a hearing in the US Congress that Bezos was no longer very deeply involved in the operational business – he had no answer to several detailed questions from MPs.
It was a turbulent time for the Amazon founder: at the beginning of 2019, Bezos’s affair with helicopter pilot and former television presenter Sanchez became known. Both were married at the time. Divorces followed. Bezos publicly accused the tabloid National Enquirer of trying to blackmail him with information about the affair. Sanchez’s brother was later exposed as a tipster. The couple’s relationship survived. Bezos’ wife Mackenzie became one of the richest women in the world through the divorce and donates generously.
Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico – in the same hospital where Sanchez was born a few years later. His parents separated when he was young and Bezos was adopted by his stepfather at the age of four. In the 1990s he gave up a promising career on New York’s Wall Street and drove with Mackenzie across the USA to Seattle to set up an online bookseller there.
Bezos made a name for himself as an aggressive innovator who put the fear into traditional retail with merciless price wars. The company survived the bursting of the Internet bubble at the turn of the century and became the world’s largest online retailer. The man whose trademark is a booming laugh can be tough. «It is our job to offer customers the best price and the best service. “Customers decide where they buy, not us,” Bezos once said when asked about the industries that Amazon was plowing up.
And he also values precision in his private life. Sanchez tells the Wall Street Journal that her fiancé gets up early every Sunday morning to make pancakes – always opening a cookbook to stick to the exact quantities. (dpa)