On July 5th, exactly 27 years after the founding of Amazon, Jeff Bezos withdrew from the day-to-day business of his e-commerce multinational. The richest person in the world (Forbes (June 2021): 198.3 billion US dollars – 167.10 billion euros) is handing over the chairmanship to Andy Jassy, who previously led the cloud computing business in the Amazon Web Services division.
…. to become the richest person in the universe: On July 20th – exactly 52 years to the day after the first moon landing – his flight into space in the spaceship “New Shepard” of Bezos “private space company” Blue Origin “is scheduled , Brother Mark is coming with me. “I’ve been dreaming of it since I was five,” says 57-year-old Bezos.
BOOM-CORONA FACTOR
Bezos wants to stay on the Amazon board of directors and pull the strings there. Bezos is by far the largest shareholder in Amazon and the architect of one of the most successful technology groups in recent decades. Not without controversy: The company’s explosive growth has raised the attention of the regulatory authorities, some believe that it has become too big – annual sales worldwide (2020) 386 billion dollars – 325 billion euros (German federal budget 2020: almost 442 billion euros). In the Corona year, Amazon and the retailers who sell via the US giant’s platform increased their sales in Germany, for example, by 36 percent to almost 30 billion euros and increased their share of the entire German online trade to 53 percent. The company employs well over a million people worldwide.
Last month, Bezos owned 51.2 million shares – or around 10% – of Amazon’s common stock, far more than the next largest shareholder, Vanguard Group, which holds around 6.5%.
How did he do it? The trained electrical engineer and computer scientist has a knack for innovation: he created the Prime service, which promises customers free delivery within two days, in 2005, and the Group’s cloud business, Amazon’s largest profit machine, just one year later. Then comes the film business: in 2011 he established the streaming platform Amazon Prime, most recently Amazon bought MGM film studios for 8.45 billion US dollars (a good 7 billion euros).
And even as a joke, Jeff Bezos blows all dimensions: a petition with the title “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to earth” has almost 150,000 on the online petition site change.org Signatures obtained.
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
