Jeff
Bezos

Amazon has long been the top online retailer in the world, but Bezos hasn’t been content to rest on his e-commerce laurels. He has been making high profiles moves in content distribution and production with Amazon Video, currently available to stream in over 200 countries, and Amazon Studios, which has a growing slate of original original series, as well as a pair of strong feature awards season contenders, “Manchester by the Sea” and “Paterson.”

Less heralded is the fact that Bezos has established the company as the world’s No. 2 cloud computing provider via its Amazon Web Services division, which has a list of clients that includes streaming video competitor Netflix.

Bezos has driven Amazon to a $500 billion market capitalization in mid-2017, and some analysts say it could hit $1 trillion by 2020. At the same time, his personal worth has gone as high as $90 billion, making him No. 1 on Forbes’ list of wealthiest people in the world for a brief time and giving him the financial wherewithal to gamble on old media investments like The Washington Post, purchased in 2013 for $250 million in cash. He’s also put money into more forward-looking, transformative business ventures such as Google (he was one of the first investors), Twitter, Uber and Airbnb.

After losing e-commerce supremacy in China to Alibaba, Bezos refocused its international ambitions on Amazon India, which he gave a $3 billion cash infusion in 2016, bringing the total investment in the division to $5 billion.

After more than two decades spent siphoning business away from traditional retailers, Amazon opened its own brick & mortar outlets, Amazon Go, a convenience store that let customers make their purchases without standing in a checkout line. Bezos doubled down on retail in July 2017 with his $13.7 billion pending acquisition of Whole Foods.