Jeff Bezos’s Net Worth Rises by $17 Billion

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 29, 9:15AM EST

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The net worth of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), has risen by $17 billion so far this year.
Amazon’s future is based on its success in artificial intelligence (AI).

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Jeff Bezos’s Net Worth Rises by $17 Billion — © Alex Wong / Getty Images News via Getty Images

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.

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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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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.