In 2023, Amazon shares increased 79%, giving Jeff Bezos an additional $65 billion. Amazon started as a website selling books, then gradually expanded to all industries, created a logistics system spanning the globe and became a technology giant.

This billionaire’s startup story makes many people admire. In 1994, with $1 million raised from friends and family, Bezos rented a house in the city and founded an online book business.

At that time, Amazon was considered “Earth’s largest bookstore” with more than 1 million books for customers to choose from. By September 1996, Amazon had more than 100 employees and had revenue of more than $15.7 million.​

Jeff Bezos built the Amazon empire. (Photo: Reuters)Over the course of 27 years, Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into a giant company. Not only successful in the core field of online shopping, the company also achieved significant achievements in the field of cloud computing, expanding entertainment and advertising.

In 2020, the company hired 175,000 seasonal workers to meet skyrocketing demand due to the pandemic. Then, 125,000 of these people had the opportunity to stay and work full-time. By September, it had added 100,000 employees in the US and Canada. In May 2021, they announced the addition of 75,000 workers.

2022 is considered a year full of difficulties and fluctuations in the technology sector, including Amazon. This company’s shares fell by 50%, becoming the first public company with a capitalization ‘evaporating’ 1,000 billion USD.

Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO in July 2021 but remained as Chairman of the company. Bezos revealed that he left Amazon because he wanted to focus on his rocket company Blue Origin.

Ambition to conquer space

Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. The billionaire wants to expand humanity’s reach in the solar system. For years, Blue Origin operated in almost complete secrecy.

But now, the goal is quite clear. “I transitioned the CEO role and the main reason I did that was to be able to spend time on Blue Origin, re-energize, bring a sense of urgency,” Bezos said.

When he was young, he had the ambition to conquer the universe. Speaking at his high school graduation ceremony, Bezos ended with a famous quote from the fantasy series: “The universe, the final frontier. Meet me there.”

He founded Blue Origin also to develop rocket and spacecraft technologies at lower costs. The company planned to build a lunar lander, collaborating with NASA and a number of other partners to establish a base on the Moon.

In 2015, Blue Origin became the first space company to successfully launch a rocket above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. The company has developed three space vehicles including New Shepard, New Glenn and Blue Moon.

The US space agency (NASA) has just awarded Blue Origin a contract to build a spacecraft to take astronauts from the earth to the moon and vice versa, worth 3.4 billion USD. The contract requires Blue Origin to conduct an unmanned flight to the Moon, followed by a flight to send astronauts to the planet, expected in 2029.

Lessons of success

In an interview on CNN, billionaire Jeff Bezos announced that he will spend most of his assets to fight climate change and support those who have the ability to unite humanity.

During his time as Amazon’s leader, Bezos frequently shared his advice and lessons learned. Bezos believes that the key to maintaining a highly innovative business is making “high-quality decisions, at high speed.”

In his final letter to shareholders as CEO of Amazon, Mr. Bezos wrote about the importance of preserving his own uniqueness.

“We all know that being different, or unique, is something that is very valuable. We are all taught to be ourselves. What I really want you to do is accept it and be realistic about How much energy do you need to maintain that difference? The world wants you to be normal in a thousand different ways… but don’t let that happen,” according to Jeff Bezos.

The billionaire believes that maintaining one’s uniqueness is worthwhile, even though it requires “constant hard work.”