Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), has a net worth of $256 billion, after rising $17 billion this year. He sits behind only Elon Musk, whose net worth is $428 billion. (Bezos may have lost some of his wealth when he divorced MacKenzie Scott, whose net worth is $43 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Many people view her as Amazon’s cofounder.) Bezos owns about 10% of Amazon.
Prospects for Amazon
The world’s largest e-commerce company.
Bezos started Amazon in 1994 before fast internet broadband was available. It ran on the then-current dial-up internet, which was not replaced for almost a decade. Amazon started out selling books.
Amazon may be the world’s largest e-commerce company. There is a debate about whether Alibaba has overtaken it, but Alibaba does business almost exclusively in China. Amazon has a huge footprint in the United States, but its international division creates tens of billions of dollars in revenue a year.
Amazon has a market cap of $2.5 trillion, which puts it behind Apple ($3.6 trillion), Microsoft ($3.3 trillion), and Nvidia ($3.2 trillion). Most of this value is probably from AWS (Amazon Web Services), which is the world’s largest cloud computing company. The AWS enterprise value is most likely worth more than Amazon’s largest e-commerce business.
Amazon ranks number two on the Fortune 500 list, which means it is the second-largest U.S. company based on revenue, with a figure of $574 billion last year. It trails only Walmart, which had revenue of $648 billion. The two are rivals. Put simply, Walmart is the leader in the brick-and-mortar retail business. Amazon holds the same position in e-commerce.
In the most recent quarter, Amazon had revenue of $158.9 billion. That was up 11% from the same period the year before. Operating income was $17.4 billion, up 55%. AWS was the engine of the success. Its operating income was $10.4 billion, on revenue of $27.5 billion. It was 60% of Amazon’s total operating income on only 18% of revenue.
Like most mega-tech companies, Amazon’s future is based on its artificial intelligence (AI) success. E-commerce success is well in the rear-view mirror, and cloud computing’s success will rely on AI.
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