Episode 485: Jeff Bezos: Behind The World’s Richest Man
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On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we look at the wealthiest man on earth, Jeff Bezos. Originally, a seller of books, Bezos has become our overlord. Most people in America rely on him for everything from groceries and clothing to furniture and even television shows. He runs one of the largest space exploration companies on earth, Blue Origin, and the Amazon servers are one of the largest hosting backbones on earth (even serving the CIA). From the birth of the Internet to controversy about how his workers are treated, this one has it all.
Bezos was born to parents who divorced right away, and he was raised by his step father, an immigrant named Bezos. He was a smart child and did very well at school, graduating with top honors from both his high school and Princeton. When he was a teen-ager, he even started a group that was dedicated to space exploration, something he’s still focusing on to this day.
He started working for various startups and landed a great job at a financial firm in New York, but in a very ballsy move, he quit and headed to Seattle to start an online bookstore. He figured that the stock market would always be there, but the start of the internet would only happen once.
So, he launched out of his garage, showing the website to a group of friends for support. His parents invested a few hundred thousand dollars, and he was off and running. Within three years, Amazon went public, and it slowly grew into the juggernaut it is today.
He eventually branched out from selling books to selling CDs and movies, and then went on to streaming to take Netflix on. Eventually, Amazon started to sell almost everything, and by 2018, he had over 100,000,000 Prime members paying their annual dues for free two day shipping and any number of digital services.
He started to spend hundreds of millions of his earnings from Amazon (eventually a billion a year) on Blue Origin, a project designed to keep humanity alive and get them to colonize other planets. Eventually, he bought the Washington Post newspaper. Many people think it was to help control his image because at the same time, he quit driving and old car and dressing casually and started to look like a James Bond villain instead.
So what is his management style like? What do people say about his personality? Why do some people think he’ll become the first trillionaire? What are the controversies around how he treats his workers? What’s up with his fashion transformation, and how much will it cost for him to send you to space? Listen, laugh, learn
Visit Our Sources:
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/jeff-bezos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/#728b5bf1b238
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jeffrey-p-bezos/
https://qz.com/1799608/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-finds-new-ways-to-spend-money/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/333159
https://www.workandmoney.com/s/jeff-bezos-wealth-facts-1be9a1efeb8b467a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-an-amazon-warehouse-employee/
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