Jeff Bezos

[close] An American technology and retail entrepreneur, investor, electrical engineer and computer scientist, best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, the world's largest online shopping retailer.

The company began as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world's largest Internet sales company on the World Wide Web, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services, which is available through its Amazon Web Services arm.

Bezos' diversified business interests also include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000) with test flights to space which started in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions.

When the financial markets opened on July 27, 2017, Bezos surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the Forbes list of billionaires to become the world's richest person, with an estimated net worth of just over $90 billion (he lost the title later in the day when Amazon's stock dropped, returning him temporarily to second place with a net worth just below $90 billion). Since October 27, 2017, Bezos has retained the position of the richest person in the world. His net worth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017, after Amazon's share price increased by more than 2.5%.