Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth $202 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos is the first person to surpass the $200 billion threshold, CNBC reported, and remains the richest person in the world.
For this milestone, Bezos can thank his company’s success, as most of his personal wealth is tied to his more than 57 million shares of Amazon stock. The e-commerce behemoth has a market cap of about $1.7 trillion.
When looking back on his success with Amazon, Bezos has said his “best decisions” were all made the same way.
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts — not [with] analysis,” Bezos said during an interview at the Economic Club Washington D.C. in 2018.
“When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart.”
Without intuition, Amazon would have missed out on “outsized discoveries” that led to its success, Bezos wrote in his 2018 letter to shareholders.
“[W]andering in business is … guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity,” he wrote in his 2018 letter. “The outsized discoveries – the ‘non-linear’ ones – are highly likely to require wandering.”
For example, Bezos’ decision to greenlight Amazon Prime was ultimately based on intuition, he said at the FIRST gala in 2018.
“There wasn’t a single financially savvy person who supported the decision to launch Amazon Prime. Zero. Every spreadsheet showed that it was going to be a disaster,” he said at the 2018 gala. “So that had to just be made with gut.”
That “gut” decision has been a huge success: Amazon has over 150 million paid Prime subscribers globally, according its fourth quarter 2019 earnings report, and revenue from subscription services, including Prime membership fees, Music Unlimited and Prime Video Channels, came in at $5.24 billion for the quarter, CNBC reported.
“People think of Amazon as very data-oriented…,” Bezos said. “But a lot of the most important decisions simply cannot be made with data.”
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