Amazon's chief Jeff Bezos has soared to nearly the top of Forbes' billionaires ranks as his online retailer's stock has climbed, in part due to its booming cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services. He owns nearly 17% of Amazon. com. Bezos boasted at the 2016 shareholders meeting that Amazon is the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales, which it cleared in 2015. Raised by his mom and stepdad, a Cuban immigrant who adopted him, he quit a lucrative New York hedge fund job in 1994 with the simple idea to sell books online. Now Amazon sells nearly everything a consumer might want. His other passion is space travel: His aerospace company, Blue Origin, is developing a reusable rocket that Bezos says will carry passengers. Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/