Earlier this year, Mr. Bezos purchased three New York apartments in a deal valued at around $80 million. If turned into a home, the three units at 212 Fifth Avenue would total over 17,000 square feet. In case you are wondering if 9 acres is going to be enough land, Bezos also bought a plot of undeveloped land in Los Angeles for $90 million. The WSJ didn't tell us how many acres.Read more here.
Over the course of just this past year, Amazon has announced the following endeavors: It will match potential home buyers with real-estate agents and integrate their new homes with Amazon devices; it will enable its voice assistant, Alexa, to access health-care data, such as the status of a prescription or a blood-sugar reading; it will build a 3-million-square-foot cargo airport outside Cincinnati; it will make next-day delivery standard for members of its Prime service; it will start a new chain of grocery stores, in addition to Whole Foods, which it already owns; it will stream Major League Baseball games; it will launch more than 3,000 satellites into orbit to supply the world with high-speed internet.Read more here.
...Over the course of just this past year, Amazon has announced the following endeavors: It will match potential home buyers with real-estate agents and integrate their new homes with Amazon devices; it will enable its voice assistant, Alexa, to access health-care data, such as the status of a prescription or a blood-sugar reading; it will build a 3-million-square-foot cargo airport outside Cincinnati; it will make next-day delivery standard for members of its Prime service; it will start a new chain of grocery stores, in addition to Whole Foods, which it already owns; it will stream Major League Baseball games; it will launch more than 3,000 satellites into orbit to supply the world with high-speed internet.
...In the vernacular, Amazon is often lumped together with Silicon Valley. At its spiritual center, however, Amazon is a retailer, not a tech company. Amazon needed to elbow its way into a tightly packed and unforgiving industry, where it faced entrenched entities such as Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and Target. In mass-market retail, the company with the thinnest margin usually prevails, and a soft December can ruin a year. Even as Bezos prided himself on his capacity for thinking far into the future, he also had to worry about the prospect of tomorrow’s collapse. At tightfisted Amazon, there were no big bonuses at year’s end, no business-class flights for executives on long hauls, no employee kitchens overflowing with protein bars.
...What is Amazon, aside from a listing on Nasdaq? This is a flummoxing question. The company is named for the world’s most voluminous river, but it also has tributaries shooting out in all directions. Retailer hardly captures the company now that it’s also a movie studio, an artificial-intelligence developer, a device manufacturer, and a web-services provider. But to describe it as a conglomerate isn’t quite right either, given that so many of its businesses are tightly integrated or eventually will be. When I posed the question to Amazonians, I got the sense that they considered the company to be a paradigm—a distinctive approach to making decisions, a set of values, the Jeff Bezos view of the world extended through some 600,000 employees. This description, of course, means that the company’s expansion has no natural boundary; no sector of the economy inherently lies beyond its core competencies.
Bezos keeps the Post structurally separate from Amazon—his family office monitors the business of the paper—but he runs it in the same expansionist spirit as he does his company. He vowed to put every dollar of profit back into the enterprise. In the six years of his ownership, the Post newsroom has grown from 500 to just over 850.
...At the heart of Amazon’s growing relationship with government is a choking irony. Last year, Amazon didn’t pay a cent of federal tax. The company has mastered the art of avoidance, by exploiting foreign tax havens and moonwalking through the seemingly infinite loopholes that accountants dream up. Amazon may not contribute to the national coffers, but public funds pour into its own bank accounts. Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.
The company is following in its owner’s tracks. Just as Bezos has folded himself into the fraternity of Washington power—yukking it up at the Alfalfa and Gridiron Clubs—thousands of Amazon implants will be absorbed by Washington. Executives will send their kids to the same fancy schools as journalists, think-tank fellows, and high-ranking government officials. Amazonians will accept dinner-party invites from new neighbors. The establishment, plenty capacious, will assimilate millionaire migrants from the other Washington. Amazon’s market power will be matched by political power; the interests of the state and the interests of one enormous corporation will further jumble—the sort of combination that has, in the past, never worked out well for democracy.
...Yet the erosion of democracy comes in different forms. Untrammeled private power might not seem the biggest threat when public power takes such abusive form. But the country needs to think like Bezos and consider the longer sweep of history before permitting so much responsibility to pool in one man, who, without ever receiving a vote, assumes roles once reserved for the state. His company has become the shared national infrastructure; it shapes the future of the workplace with its robots; it will populate the skies with its drones; its website determines which industries thrive and which fall to the side. His investments in space travel may remake the heavens. The incapacity of the political system to ponder the problem of his power, let alone check it, guarantees his Long Now. He is fixated on the distance because he knows it belongs to him.
Technology giant Amazon has dropped a Christian non-profit, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, from the AmazonSmile charity donation program after the SPLC deemed the organization a “hate group.”Read more here.
In 2016, Mr. Bezos bought a $23 million home in Washington, one of the city’s most expensive, which is undergoing extensive renovations to make it a suitable party spot for the city’s political class.Read more here.
...The investor Warren E. Buffett, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s, said the cautionary tale of Microsoft, which faced a landmark antitrust case by the government that decade, must loom in Mr. Bezos’ mind. Microsoft, by far the most dominant technology company at the time, lost its footing after the case, opening an unexpected opportunity for competitors.
“You’re going to get a lot of scrutiny if you’re disrupting other people’s livelihoods,” Mr. Buffett said.
...Mr. Bezos is known for asking his dinner guests to stick to a single conversation topic at a time to keep people from splintering off into private side discussions.
...He became an active user of Twitter in late 2015, posting a photo of himself wearing his lucky cowboy boots and a video clip of him standing atop a wind turbine in Texas. At an event with his brother in Los Angeles in November, as part of a long lineup of presentations by an array of business, wellness and entertainment leaders, he said his ideal job would be bartender, partly because he enjoys talking to people.
Jeff Bezos just became America’s third-richest person.Read more here.
The 51-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. has so far added almost $5 billion to his fortune as the online retailer rose in after-hours trading and pushed his net worth above $55 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos passes brothers Charles and David Koch, and ranks behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S.
Before Thursday’s surge, Bezos’s fortune had jumped 77 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud segment. The $22 billion year-to-date increase is the most of anyone on the index and more than the combined gains of Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazon shares rose 10 percent from the close to $621 at 4:47 p.m. in New York. The increase will make him the fifth-richest person on Earth, up from the No. 20 spot on Jan. 1.
The Internet entrepreneur’s soaring wealth contrasts with that of the Walton family who together control more than half of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. Alice, Christy, Jim and Rob Walton are among the worst-performing billionaires this year, down a combined $43 billion as the mass merchandiser invests in stores and e-commerce in an attempt to revitalize sales at the retailing giant.
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Jeff Bezos just became America’s third-richest person.
The 51-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. has so far added almost $5 billion to his fortune as the online retailer rose in after-hours trading and pushed his net worth above $55 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos passes brothers Charles and David Koch, and ranks behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S.
Before Thursday’s surge, Bezos’s fortune had jumped 77 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud segment. The $22 billion year-to-date increase is the most of anyone on the index and more than the combined gains of Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazon shares rose 10 percent from the close to $621 at 4:47 p.m. in New York. The increase will make him the fifth-richest person on Earth, up from the No. 20 spot on Jan. 1.
The Internet entrepreneur’s soaring wealth contrasts with that of the Walton family who together control more than half of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. Alice, Christy, Jim and Rob Walton are among the worst-performing billionaires this year, down a combined $43 billion as the mass merchandiser invests in stores and e-commerce in an attempt to revitalize sales at the retailing giant.
“People don’t aspire to shop at Wal-Mart,” said Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at Tigress Financial Partners, who has a buy rating on Amazon and is neutral on Wal-Mart. “An improving economy is a negative for Wal-Mart. As incomes go up, people stop shopping there. Customers enjoy shopping at Amazon.”
Amazon shares represent about 95 percent of Bezos’ net worth. The closely held Koch family fortune is spread across a number of industrial companies, including paper producer Georgia-Pacific LLC, oil businesses Flint Hill Resources LLC and Koch Pipeline Company LP, as well as manufacturers of fertilizers, polymers and fibers. The asset values are calculated using revenue of $115 billion that’s reported on the website of holding company Koch Industries Inc.
The second-best performing billionaire this year is Spain’s Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex SA, the world’s biggest clothing retailer, who’s added $15 billion, a 24 percent gain. China’s richest person, Wang Jianlin has added $11 billion, a 44 percent rise. Ortega is the world’s second-richest person with $76 billion and Wang is 12th with $36 billion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index is a daily ranking of the world’s richest people that’s updated every business day. It uses prices at the market close in New York to derive the value of publicly traded assets. Thursday’s list doesn’t reflect after-hours trading.
