Wednesday, February 19, 2025

January 10, 2018

A Day In The Life Of The Richest Person Ever

CEO and founder of the online retail behemoth Amazon, Jeff Bezos has just been named the wealthiest person in history. Here's what he gets up to on the daily.
attends Amazon Studios Golden Globes Celebration at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 8, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California.

According to Bloomberg, the founder and CEO of Amazon is worth $105 billion (R1,3 trillion).

Over and above the online retail behemoth, Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post and an aerospace company, Blue Origin.

Although the frugal entrepreneur does enjoy his privacy and keeps many details of his life out of the media (he doesn’t believe in office perks like free massages or lunch, though – boo), the information Business Insider laid out shows an interesting character.

It’s rumoured that once upon a time, he was an explosive boss, so hired a life coach to calm his nerves.

Now, he lives the good life.

Waking up every morning without an alarm, he never schedules meetings in the early mornings so as to spend adequate time with his wife, MacKenzie, and children.

Bezos first met MacKenzie back in 1993 when they both worked at the investment management firm D.E. Shaw:

MacKenzie was a research associate and Jeff was a vice president. Jeff was the first person to interview MacKenzie — a fellow Princeton grad — at the firm.

MacKenzie made the first move and asked Jeff out to lunch. They were engaged within three months, and married within six.

Then, Jeff told his wife about his business idea. MacKenzie said that, while she’s not a “business person,” she could hear the passion in her husband’s voice when he spoke. The following year, in 1994, they quit their jobs and traveled to Seattle to found Amazon.

Now, the couple are the 25th largest landowners in the US:

[T]hey own five houses across the US, in Medina, Washington, Beverly Hills, Van Horn, Texas, DC, and Manhattan.

At first, MacKenzie was an accountant at Amazon, but now she is a novelist:

MacKenzie — who was an assistant to Toni Morrison in college — is now a novelist. When she needs to write, Bezos retreats to her own small apartment, where she writes until it’s time to pick the kids up from school. MacKenzie told Vogue her husband is her “best reader.”

He’d often drop other plans to read and carefully review manuscripts of her first novel “The Testing of Luther Albright.” For MacKenzie’s second novel, “Traps,” she decided to not share her work with her husband until was finished.

Here are some other random facts about the CEO:

  • Bezos has a taste for unusual dishes. During a meeting with Woot founder Matt Rutledge, he ordered octopus with potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and eggs for breakfast. “When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had,” Bezos said. “I must have the breakfast octopus.”
  • Bezos also has a fondness for food trucks. In 2014, he told Business Insider Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget about a phenomenally popular truck outside of Amazon’s headquarters. “It’s out of control, actually,” he said.
  • Amazon now runs several popular original series, like “The Man in the High Castle” and “Transparent,” but the Amazon CEO is a Trekkie. Bezos even made a surprise cameo in the 2016 film “Star Trek Beyond.”
  • Other than watching “Star Trek,” Bezos has another space-related hobby: gliding about in a submarine looking for old NASA rockets. He often brings his kids along for the adventure.
  • When he does call a meeting, Bezos employs a “two-pizza rule” — he never organizes [sic] a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.

We can put up with a business meeting as long as those pizzas are from Butler’s. Hell, if you really want to be fancy you can order them online.

Head to their site, scroll down the page, and you’ll see the TeleButler there to help from 5PM every evening:

Now you just have to navigate the office politics around pineapple on pizza and you’re good to go.

[Pro tip: order The Rotherham – less base, no pineapple, you’re a hero.]

You do you, Jeff.

[source:businessinsider&businessinsider]