5 Biggest Money Milestones in Jeff Bezos’ Career Towards Becoming a Billionaire
Jeff Bezos currently boasts a net worth of $211 billion, making him the second richest person in the world — first place goes to Bernard Arnault, who holds $218 billion. Like fellow multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, Bezos didn’t come from money and built his massive wealth all on his own.
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But Bezos’ approach to making billions differs from Buffett’s, whose main source of wealth comes from investing. What did Bezos do to generate so much income? Here are the biggest money milestones in his journey thus far.
Launching the Dream Institute
While still in high school, Bezos and his then-girlfriend created his first business, the Dream Institute, a cultural camp for kids that encouraged creative and imaginative thinking. They charged $600 per enrollee and got six signups. That amounts to just $3,600: Not exactly a great fortune, but it’s a pretty sum for a couple of teens, and it sure beat working at McDonald’s — which Bezos previously did and hated.
The Dream Institute was Bezos’ first formal venture into entrepreneurship and making money.
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Joining Fitel — and Turning Down Offers From Bigger Companies
Fresh out of Princeton with a major in computer science and graduating with the highest honors, Bezos was offered positions at several big companies, including Intel and Bell Labs.
Bezos turned them all down and went for a more low-profile gig where, perhaps, he could make more of an impact and better hone his leadership skills. He accepted a job at Fitel, a telecommunications startup, as employee No. 11.
Job Hopping in the Financial Sector
Fitel turned out to be not the right fit for the ambitious young entrepreneur, who frowned upon its leadership. “This is not the right way to organize a startup company,” Bezos told Wired in 1999.
Though Bezos seems to not have appreciated Fitel’s structure, he swiftly rose up in the company, going on to become head of development and director of customer service. Bezos’ goal was to grow the business, but Fitel just didn’t have the power to get fully off the ground.
After two years with the startup, Bezos left and got a job at Banker’s Trust (now part of Deutsche Bank) as a product manager. Again, he rose up quickly, and became vice president.
Though Bezos was likely making very good money, the company, once again, just wasn’t a fit for him. After two years at Banker’s Trust, Bezos left and signed on with the hedge fund D.E. Shaw — only two years old at the time. Four years later, he became a vice president, with the duty of researching emerging business opportunities on the internet. This was back in the ’90s, so the industry was fresh with potential.
Here’s where Bezos started to really get into his groove. According to Business Insider, Bezos crafted a list of 20 products he could sell online, landing on books as the most viable on the list. But D.E Shaw wasn’t sold. Off Bezos went to do his own thing.
Thinking Long-Term About What He Wanted to Do — And Taking a Risk
Bezos has acknowledged that leaving a secure career to follow his own vision was a risky move.
“I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time,” Bezos said in “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone, which describes the rise of Amazon. “That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old.”
Bezos decided he would much rather commit to making a career in the internet, where he found the most groundbreaking potential.
“At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event,” Bezos said in the biography. “When I thought about it that way … it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”
Starting Amazon Out of His Garage and Growing It to Massive Profit
Bezos’ biggest move made towards becoming a billionaire was launching Amazon in 1994. Then called “Cadabra” and exclusively an online bookseller, Amazon was born out of a garage space in Bezos’ home — a rental — in Bellevue, Washington. He soon changed the name to Amazon after considering the unfortunate similarities between the words “cadabra” and “cadaver.”
Amazon didn’t immediately soar to profitability; in the beginning, the company saw losses. But those losses didn’t take the company down, and soon Amazon was raking in enough to offset them. Between Q3 and Q4 1996, Amazon’s revenues increased from $4.2 million to $8.5 million.
In 1998, Bezos augmented Amazon’s business by selling more than just books. Upon this expansion, the company began to take off as a global force to be reckoned with. Amazon saw its net profits increase from $3 million in Q4 2002 to $73 million in Q4 2003.
And the rest is billion-dollar history.
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