With a net worth of $56.6 billion, Jeff Bezos ranks fourth on our recently published list of the 50 richest people on earth, produced in collaboration with Wealth-X, a company that researches the super-wealthy.
That makes him the world's richest tech CEO.
Bezos' wealth eclipses the fortunes of other tech titans like Oracle's Larry Ellison ($45.3 billion), Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg ($42.8 billion), and Google's duo of Larry Page ($38.5 billion) and Sergey Brin ($37 billion), thanks to the rapid growth of Amazon.com, the world's leader in e-commerce.
Most of Bezos' fortune is comprised of an 18% stake in Amazon worth almost $50 billion — a nearly $18 billion increase from a year ago. Amazon stock has climbed almost 60% over that span as sales and profitability have soared: Total revenue hit $107 billion with profits of $600 million in 2015, up from $89 billion and a loss of $240 million in 2014.
Bezos founded Amazon.com in the garage of his Seattle home in 1994 and operated it exclusively as an online book retailer. The company went public three years later with $16 million in annual sales and has since grown to include everything from furniture to food to Amazon's own consumer-electronics products. The internet retailer also has a thriving cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services, and a bold plan to conquer India's "trillion dollar" online-retail market.
Though most of his fortune is in Amazon, Bezos has made several large investments outside of the company, including the more than $500 million he reportedly put into his privately owned space company Blue Origin, which successfully launched its first spacecraft in 2015. He also bought the The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and has since taken a hands-on role in its management. And in January he invested millions in a company that's creating a simple blood test to detect every form of cancer.
Bezos is one of 13 tech moguls to make the Business Insider and Wealth-X ranking of the world's 50 richest people. Among them he only trails Bill Gates ($87.4 billion), who is no longer actively involved in Microsoft.
