How Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spends his $166 billion, from 10,000-year underground clocks to flying to the edge of space
- Jeff Bezos has amassed a $166 billion fortune since founding Amazon in 1994.
- He's spent his money on charity, unusual ventures, and personal projects like Blue Origin.
Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has become one of the wealthiest and most recognizable figures in the tech world.
Recent years have brought him a high-profile divorce, a trip via spaceship to the edge of space, his firm's skyrocketed share price during the pandemic, and his departure from the role as CEO of the company he founded 28 years ago.
Nowadays, the 58-year-old is focused on his other endeavors, including his space exploration company Blue Origin that recently flew actor William Shatner to the edge of space as well as The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013. He's also been busy trying to get his $500 million under-construction megayacht past a historic Dutch bridge and enjoys traveling the globe with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez.
And, of course, there's what Forbes says is the $166.8 billion fortune he has accumulated over the years. Here's how he spends it, from real estate to travel to his personal projects.
Andy Kiersz, Taylor Nicole Rogers, and Hillary Hoffower previously contributed to this reporting.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the source of much of his wealth, on July 5, 1994.
Bezos' parents were reportedly shocked that he would give up a cushy Wall Street job in order to sell books over the internet.
Source: Bloomberg, "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
But they eventually came around.
Bezos' parents invested about a quarter of a million dollars in the fledgling company, a stake that would be worth as much as $30 billion today.
Source: Bloomberg
Bezos also received a lot of support from his then-wife MacKenzie.
She negotiated Amazon's first freight contract and did the company's accounting. Per the terms of their 2019 divorce settlement, MacKenzie holds a 4% stake in the company, which forms the majority of her $59 billion fortune.
Source: Forbes
Amazon made its initial public offering on May 15, 1997.
Since that day, the split-adjusted stock price has increased over 170,000%.
Amazon's rise left several early internet competitors in the dust.
In the company's first post-IPO shareholder letter, Bezos mentioned strategic partnerships with several peers like America Online, Prodigy, and Yahoo that have either gone out of business entirely or been purchased by competitors in the years since.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon has steadily grown over the last two decades
It now sells a wide variety of consumer products, electronics, and digital media.
Another big growth area was Amazon Web Services.
Analysts project that the cloud unit is on track to becoming a $3 trillion company.
Source: Business Insider
Amazon has also grown through various acquisitions over time.
The company's 2009 purchase of online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion stood as Amazon's biggest acquisition for about eight years.
Source: Visual Capitalist
But then came Amazon's 2017 $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods.
The Whole Foods acquisition has dramatically boosted Amazon's push into the grocery world. A 2019 study from OneClickRetail estimates that Amazon had an 18% share of the US online grocery market.
Source: Visual Capitalist, Business Insider
Amazon's rise is the primary source of Bezos' fortune.
Bezos has made several investments in other companies.
He's done so on both a personal level and through his venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions.
Bezos personally invested in Google in 1998, and his $1 million early investment would likely have made him a billionaire even without his extensive Amazon wealth.
Bezos Expeditions has invested in several startups, including blood testing biotech firm Grail, popular software developer website Stack Overflow, and Insider.
Business Insider was acquired by Axel Springer in 2015. Jeff Bezos is no longer invested.
Source: Visual Capitalist, "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
A notable purchase was The Washington Post in 2013.
Bezos shelled out $250 million for the legacy newspaper. Since Bezos' acquisition, the Post has greatly expanded its digital offerings, and readership has exploded.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos' wealth is hard to wrap your head around.
His wealth is so massive that, according to Business Insider's 2018 calculations when he had a mere $130 billion fortune, spending $88,000 to him was similar to an average American spending $1.
Source: Business Insider
He is also one of the country's biggest landowners.
He and his family own at least five homes across the US.
One estate, with two homes on 5.3 acres of land, is located in Medina, Washington, not far from Amazon's Seattle headquarters.
Insider's Harrison Jacobs visited Medina in 2017 to get a sense of what the haven for Seattle's mega-wealthy is like. Jacobs got a picture of the outside of Bezos' estate, but tall hedges and a gate blocked any view inside.
Source: Business Insider, Business Insider
Bezos also owns a Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
He bought that property in 2007 for a reported $24.25 million. He bought another, smaller house right next door a decade later.
He also owns a ranch in Van Horn, Texas, which serves as a base for his Blue Origin space exploration company.
Source: Business Insider
He's got sleek pads in Manhattan.
Bezos owns several condos in the historic Century building at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan.
In June 2019, the Amazon CEO reportedly dropped about $80 million on another three adjacent apartments in a different building at 212 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The spread consists of a three-story penthouse and the two units directly below it.
Bezos purchased a townhouse in Washington, DC in 2016.
Source: Business Insider, Business Insider
Then there's the other Beverly Hills mansion.
Bezos reportedly spent $165 million on the property, dubbed the Warner Estate. The Wall Street Journal reported the sale in February 2020.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
As for ground transportation, he's been fairly frugal.
As recently as 2013, he was still driving a Honda Accord, according to the book "The Everything Store."
Source: "The Everything Store" via Business Insider
He does own a $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet though.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos sometimes has a taste for exotic cuisine.
The founder of e-commerce startup Woot recounted a breakfast with Bezos shortly after Amazon acquired the company at which the billionaire ordered octopus.
The founder recounted Bezos explaining similarities between Amazon's acquisition of Woot and his offbeat breakfast order. "You're the octopus that I'm having for breakfast," Bezos said. "When I look at the menu, you're the thing I don't understand, the thing I've never had. I must have the breakfast octopus."
Source: Business Insider
He's donated to charity, but not as much as his peers.
Billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have both pledged to donate the majority of their fortunes to charity.
Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie, did sign Gates' Giving Pledge in May 2019, pledging to donate more than half of her fortune during her lifetime.
In a blog post in mid-2020, MacKenzie announced that over the past year she has donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations that support causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health, and climate change.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos has, however, supported Mary's Place.
It's a Seattle organization that provides shelter and employment training to those who are homeless, and TheDream.US, which supports people who were brought to the US as undocumented immigrants when they were children.
According to CNBC, Bezos also donated significant sums to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington Foundation, and Princeton University.
Source: Business Insider, CNBC
Bezos also supports more unusual ventures.
Take the Long Now Foundation, which seeks to build a giant mechanical "10,000-year clock" underground in West Texas.
The clock is intended to be a "symbol for long-term thinking," according to a tweet from Bezos.
Source: Business Insider
Bezos has a lifelong fascination with NASA.
He's long been inspired by space travel since watching the Apollo moon landings in his childhood. In 2013, Bezos funded and led an expedition to recover one of the rocket engines from the Apollo 12 mission from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Source: The Seattle Times
So it makes sense that he founded Blue Origin.
The space exploration company has had several successful test flights of its reusable New Shepard rocket, and is currently developing the larger, mostly reusable New Glenn rocket system, intended to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Source: Business Insider
The goal is in part to colonize the solar system.
In the long term, Bezos intends for Blue Origin to support large-scale human spaceflight.
In 2018, Bezos told Matthias Döpfner, CEO of Insider's parent company Axel Springer, that he considers Blue Origin "the most important work [he's] doing."
Indeed, Bezos told Döpfner that he plans to spend his entire fortune on space exploration, saying, "I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that."
Source: Business Insider, Business Insider
He has pledged $10 billion to fight climate change.
"I'm committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer," Bezos wrote on Instagram in February 2020. "Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let's protect it, together."
Source: Business Insider
Bezos also spends plenty of cash in his personal life.
He threw a star-studded birthday bash for girlfriend Lauren Sanchez in December 2019.
Source: Business Insider
He may or may not be the world's richest man.
And Bezos is still getting richer.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic upended the American economy in March 2020, in August, Bezos hit a wealth milestone no one else has ever reached.
Amazon's share price has surged throughout the pandemic as Americans practice social distancing to slow the virus' spread and increasingly turn to Amazon's delivery services for daily necessities, making Bezos the first person in human history with a net worth over $200 billion, per Forbes. It has since dropped to $166.8 billion.
Bezos doesn't plan to keep all of what he's added to his net worth so far this year, however. In April 2020, he pledged to donate $100 million to food banks facing shortages due to the economic crisis spurred by the pandemic.
"My own time now is wholly focused on COVID-19 and how Amazon can best play its role," Bezos wrote in March 2020. "I want you to know that Amazon will continue to do its part, and we won't stop looking for new opportunities to help."
Source: Insider
But that growth has caught regulators' eye.
But Amazon's continuous growth has drawn increasing scrutiny from lawmakers, culminating in a historic antitrust hearing in front of the House House Antitrust Subcommittee on July 29, where Bezos testified alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
In prepared testimony released on his blog the day before, Bezos argued that Amazon's size benefits consumers, sellers, and the US economy and that it still faces competition from Walmart, Instacart, and Shopify.
Source: Business Insider
He can still focus on his personal projects though.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in mid-2021 and moved into the role of executive chair of the Amazon Board. He plans to focus on new products and early initiatives.
"As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I've never had more energy, and this isn't about retiring," Bezos wrote to employees at the time. "I'm super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have."
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