Bezos "broke through" $ 100 billion. Where will he spend it?

The other day, Jeff Bezos entrenched in the status of the richest man in the world. Against the background of unexpectedly high growth in sales from Amazon.com during the holidays, the company's shares jumped, and now, for the first time since 1999, someone has again stepped over $ 100 billion.

Only, unlike Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and other billionaires, Bezos does not give money to charity. He sells Amazon shares for $ 1 billion annually and spends them on his hobbies. And his hobby is very large. While Bill Gates is fighting malaria in Africa, Bezos wants to get around Ilona Mask in rocket science and determine the path of humanity 10,000 years ahead. Looking at his finances, I think, it is quite possible. At Pochtoy.com, we are looking at what this eccentric billionaire spends time and money on, the behavior of which really affects a large part of our business.

Daily routine

The head of Amazon is known for its "zamorochkami." For example, when organizing meetings in a corporation, it always includes the “two-pizza rule”. According to him, so many people should be present at the meeting so that they can be fed with two pizzas. Otherwise, the meeting will always be ineffective. Bezos does not respect corporate meetings at all: he meets investors with Amazon no more than six hours a year. The remaining time is devoted to finding new ideas and relaxing with your family.

Bezos with his wife

Jeff has earned himself a reputation as a very impulsive boss. His explosive nature calmed down only in the 2010s; it was then that rumors began in the corporation that he hired a coach to help him keep himself under control. But Amazon workers are still not spoiled by the gadgets that Google and Facebook employees have. There is a much tighter daily routine, there is no free equipment, there are no massages, and even in the cafeteria for some of the products you have to lay out your own pocket.

On average, IT staff is staying at Amazon for 12 months. The company has a second (from the end) result in the Fortune 500 list in this regard. And this is despite the fact that it pays 30% more than the average for the industry. Well, warehouse workers generally believe that they are in hell . They work for 10-12 hours, lift weights weighing up to 22 kg and in one shift they pass from 12 to 20 kilometers in search of things ordered by buyers. As a result, the company manages to sell products with minimal wrap, customers glow with pleasure, and Amazon grows by 20-25% every year. She was even called the most beloved IT company among Americans . But working on Bezos is not enough fun.

Amazon office

Culinary tastes of the richest person on the planet are quite unusual. Unlike Steve Jobs, who ate the same breakfast every morning to “reduce the number of decisions made,” the head of Amazon does not like to repeat. Jeff Bezos’s meeting with Matt Rutledge, the founder of Woot Internet Discounter, which offers several select gadgets every day, but with big discounts, is well known. For lunch there they served octopus with bacon in garlic sauce. "If I see something that I haven't eaten yet, I have to try it," says Jeff. Woot, by the way, he later bought, as well as another promising online retailer with low prices, Zappos .

And after lunch - another ritual: Bezos always hand-washes the dishes. He says, "Washing the dishes is my most sexual and masculine occupation." By the way, the second rich man of the planet, Bill Gates, adheres to the same opinion. In his AMA on Reddit, the question of what a strange occupation he likes, Bill said that he washes dishes and guests every night - because "I like the way I do it." Billionaire friends have not gone mad: research confirms that such calm routine exercises that unload the brain are a great way to reduce stress levels and incorporate creativity.

In the evenings, Bezos watches a TV show, Star Trek's favorite TV show. The head of Amazon even played an alien in the 2016 Star Trek: Infinity movie. From the books, Jeff recommends "The Stranger in a Foreign Country" by Robert Heinlein, "Black Handsome" by Anna Sewell, "Dwellers of the Hills" by Richard Adams and "Dune" by Frank Herbert.

Bezos - right

Another billionaire hobby is traveling on his own submarine. The head of Amazon uses it to search for fallen NASA missiles. Three of his sons and a foster Chinese daughter are regularly involved in the underwater adventures of Bezos.

Jeff is a big lover of sleep. Unlike most CEOs in IT, who sleep four hours a day, Amazon’s manager rests at least eight. He believes in the value of every hour of sleep, considers it the best cure for stress and chronic fatigue. At the start of the project of his online store, he even brought a sleeping bag to the office in order to take a quick nap on those days that required him to make particularly important decisions. And be sure - without an alarm clock, to wake up only when you want it. Researchers also believe that this mode is useful for the brain.

Cosmos beckons

At school, Jeff once told teachers that "the future of humanity is not on this planet." But he never dreamed of becoming an astronaut. His goal since childhood was to run his successful business and to have enough money to launch missiles into space himself. As soon as Amazon began to generate a stable cash flow, in 2000 Bezos launched its private aerospace company, Blue Origin. The name seems to hint at its task: to make the people of the future live in different star systems and remember the Earth as a blue planet, from where they originated. The short-term goal is space tourism. Ideally, the flights will be so comfortable that even the head of Amazon in its more than fifty years could be in orbit.

Blue Origin is moving in the same direction as SpaceX from Ilona Mask, only for personal (“pocket”) money of Bezos, without the support of a large NASA wallet. Every year, Bezos sells $ 1 billion of Amazon shares to finance this project (for comparison, Ilon Musk invested only $ 100 million in his company). Blue Origin has a land plot of about 770 km2 in the state of Texas - a little less than Moscow, but 7 times larger than Paris. With a cosmodrome, a landing zone, an assembly building and training centers for astronauts.

There is not much information that the company develops and tests in private territory. Blue Origin began to share its achievements only in the last couple of years, looking at the hyip around SpaceX. It is known that the company successfully tested its space shuttle New Shepard, and in 2016, it launched a rocket to an altitude of 103 km, and then returned to the ground and the capsule and stage. New Shepard became the first reusable suborbital ship, three times launched into space (up to the Karman line) and successfully returned, having made a soft controlled landing three times.

One of the test runs

The company wants to launch its first ships with a crew in 2018. And in 2019, Blue Origin is expected to receive the first paid customers for space flights. Bezos says that after the first stage of space tourism, his company will expand the boundaries of human existence in space. Decade 2020-2030, the world's leading billionaire wants to devote to the construction of space civilization.

Newspapers and steamers

Bezos, like a normal billionaire, spends money not only on his hobbies, but also on real estate. He has several expensive residences in the USA. He spends most of his time at the lake house in the town of Medina (a suburb of Bellevue) at the price of $ 25 million. One of his neighbors there is the rich man of the world No. 2, Bill Gates.

In the US capital, Washington, the businessman has a modest house of 2500 square meters, the most expensive in the city. He bought for $ 23 million the building of the textile museum and remade its interiors for themselves and guests. Neighbors - Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as Ivanka Trump.

Bezos Mansion in California

The founder of Amazon owns an estate in Beverly Hills worth $ 25 million. And in Manhattan, he combined three apartments of The Century skyscraper overlooking Central Park. It turned out a large apartment for $ 17 million. Although in sum, all these residences cost less than $ 100 million - in fact, a penny.

It is known that a few years after Bezos became a multimillionaire, his wife drove him to work on his old Honda Accord. Now the businessman has slightly different tastes. It travels on a personal plane for $ 66.5 million - the 2015 Gulfstream G-650ER, capable of the world's longest flights. He also invested $ 42 million in building several hours on his land in the mountains of Texas, able to work for 10 thousand years . “To teach people to think about the future. If more people start to include long-term thinking, plan not for the next 5 years, but for the next 100 or 200, it is well worth it. Plus, this is an interesting engineering problem that no one has yet solved. ” A mountain with a clock stands just above the platform where Blue Origin launches test rockets into space.

Bezos bought the Washington Post newspaper, one of the oldest and most famous in the country, for $ 250 million in 2013. Then the newspaper was unprofitable. The billionaire promised to provide her with a “financial pillow” so that she could issue independent investigations and not worry about the money. Part of her scandalous investigations touched Donald Trump. After becoming president, he threatened Bezos with an anti-monopoly committee, hinting that he could split Amazon and take control of the American online trading market away from the company. Experts believe that Trump has no such chances: the goal of a monopoly is to maximize his income, the goal of Amazon at this stage is, on the contrary, to make goods as cheap as possible. The company's net profit is ten times less than that of corporations of similar size, and users are only in profit from this. The American public Amazon loves , and to do something with it at the moment is not possible.

One very real criticism of Bezos is that, spending money on dozens of unusual projects, he almost donates to charity. He does not have a clear philanthropic campaign like Gates, Zuckerberg, or Buffet. In June 2017, many were amused by the fact that he turned to the Twitter public for ideas on where to donate his millions. Bezos never signed the Oath of Donation , and in general he has spent only $ 100 million on charity so far - less than 0.1% of his fortune. If the same Gates did not donate his money to improve the situation in Africa, to solve the problems of disease and hunger, he probably would have remained No. 1.

In the meantime, Bezos’s main spending goes through the Amazon line to expand its company's influence, improve its store and conquer new markets. He bought a network of premium supermarkets Whole Foods for $ 13.7 billion, several dozen online services and offline stores, he develops and sells his own gadgets. Last year, Amazon Video developed well: the service is now releasing its series, planning to outrun Netflix in the coming year even by audience in the States (the Lord of the Rings series announced should help with this). A new futuristic headquarters of Amazon for $ 5 billion threatens to become one of the most expensive buildings in the world. 50,000 employees of the company will work there, and now 238 US cities are fighting for the right to place it on their territory.

And how do you feel about Bezos? Who is he - mean or visionary?

Our corner

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