In cash: Jeff Bezos has grown rich on $ 2,8 billion after opening Amazon Go and has broken a personal record

The state of the founder of Amazon exceeds $ 113 billion, but given the inflation of the richest in history, there remains Bill Gates

The only state owner in the world at $ 100 billion has just become a couple of billion richer. On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, made a fortune of $ 2.8 billion, on that day the shares of the electronic trading giant grew by 2.5% - the day after the opening of the first store without cashiers attracted the attention of the entire industry.

Now the state of Bezos is $ 113.5 billion, according to estimates of Forbes - more than ever. He is a big lead over the second and third richest people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with $ 92.5 billion and $ 92.3 billion, respectively. Due to his twelve-digit status, Bezos nominally becomes the richest man, but with the inflation adjustment Bill Gates was richer in 1999, when he briefly exceeded $ 100 billion - about $ 150 billion at today's prices.

In addition, the founder of Microsoft donated much of his fortune: in his entire life he donated more than $ 36 billion to charity. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, run by Gates and his wife, is the world's largest private charity.

Bezos only recently began to donate his own funds. In June 2017, Bezos, the son of a Cuban immigrant, asked his 400,000 Twitter subscribers to advise ideas for charity and recently donated $ 33 million to establish scholarships for college education for schoolchildren without formal immigration status.

The source of most of Bezos's wealth is its 16% stake in Amazon. In addition, he is the owner of The Washington Post and the founder of the rocket startup Blue Origin. The Post is doing well: in January it was reported that in 2017 the number of subscribers to the electronic version of the newspaper doubled, and the second year in a row, the publication makes a profit.

On January 18, Amazon published a list of 20 finalists for the second headquarters of the company. A total of 238 applications were received from all over North America. Already four days later, the long-awaited Amazon Go store opened in Seattle. The store, which was previously only available to employees, sells a limited assortment of food, semi-finished products and finished products. Customers enter the store with the Amazon Go app, pick up the goods from the shelves and exit - they do not even need to wait for the cashiers. Throughout the store there are cameras that track the purchases of each customer, and the account is invoiced through their accounts on Amazon.

It is not clear which next steps Amazon will take towards Amazon Go, but the company increases the number of physical sales points through the opening of bookstores and the acquisition of the Whole Foods supermarket chain.

Bezos started on Wall Street, where he worked at the DE Shaw hedge fund after graduating from Princeton University with diplomas in computer science and electrical engineering. Having made a career in DE Shaw, in 1994, Bezos resigned and traveled across the country to Seattle in 1994. He founded Amazon in the garage of his house and began selling books online, and personally took the parcels to the post in his 1987 Chevy Blazer. Now the online store is one of the most expensive companies in the world and works in the field of cloud services, online broadcasts and smart devices. Its market capitalization exceeds $ 650 billion.

A source: http://www.forbes.ru