Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018 at $112 billion, making him the richest person in the world.Mouse pointer track after few hours of working on computer. Bezos bought The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million in 2013. Blue Origin bought a launch site in Texas soon thereafter and planned to introduce a crewed suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard, in 2018 and an orbital launch vehicle, New Glenn, in 2020. Other activitiesĪside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000.
However, he planned to remain at Amazon as executive chairman. In February 2021 Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as CEO later that year. The unprecedented numbers were, in part, caused by a rise in home shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later Amazon registered record profits, and its revenue in the fourth quarter that year surpassed $100 billion for the first time. About half of the company’s operating income in 2018 was derived from AWS. Amazon’s yearly net sales increased from $510,000 in 1995 to some $600 million in 1998 and from more than $19.1 billion in 2008 to almost $233 billion in 2018. That same year Amazon moved into making its own television shows and movies with its Amazon Studios division. Amazon announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books had surpassed those of hardcover books. In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle, a digital book reader with wireless Internet connectivity, enabling customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand. Amazon diversified even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing service that eventually became the largest such service in the world. The success of Amazon encouraged other retailers, including major book chains, to establish online stores.Īs more companies battled for Internet dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of products, including consumer electronics, apparel, and hardware. In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores. In June 1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos. Open 24 hours a day, the site was user-friendly, encouraging browsers to post their own reviews of books and offering discounts, personalized recommendations, and searches for out-of-print books. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!Īmazon quickly became the leader in e-commerce.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.