As of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the richest person on earth, with his personal fortune eclipsing the wealth amassed by legendary investor Warren Buffet and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates.1 Bezos made the top spot of Forbes magazine's 2018 400 Richest in America list with a net worth of $160 billion.2 Jeff Bezos has literally dozens of ideas that span a broad range of investments, all the way from real estate to the retrieval of rocket ship engines from the ocean floor.

The founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of global e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is responsible for running a platform that accounted for 4% of all U.S. retail sales in 2017 and a whopping 44% of digital spending.3 As digitalization reshapes human behavior and the cloud computing revolution does the same to enterprise, the leader in online retail, with its high-flying cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) is only forecasted to propel higher — spelling more good news for its CEO.

When Bezos had his idea for "the everything store," his well-intentioned friends and family tried to talk him out of quitting his "stable job" in finance. Yet Bezos, raised by his teen mom and later his Cuban immigrant stepfather, always dreamed of creating something different, once telling his school teacher that "the future of mankind is not on this planet." Bezos even has a website, BezosExpeditions.com, that provides a rundown of 20 or so of his major investments and charitable donations. The name "expeditions" is appropriate since Bezos' investments are not concentrated in just one or two industries or even market sectors; rather, they represent a far-flung exploration of many different business areas and ideas, including media, virtual reality, cloud computing, and homespun arts and crafts.