Jeff Bezos and Amazon: Little-Known Facts | Entrepreneur | Finance

Not only has Amazon been successful in its core business of online shopping due to growing demand, but the company has also made significant strides in cloud computing, and has expanded into entertainment and advertising. As Amazon’s power and ambition have grown, the company has hired a huge number of employees and has set its footprint across the United States.

Starting Monday (July 5), when he hands over the CEO role to Andy Jassy to become executive chairman, billionaire Jeff Bezos will enter a new life, spending more time exploring the universe, doing charity work, buying real estate and yachts.

Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos. Photo: Bloomberg.

Multi-field business

Amazon dominates online retail, accounting for about 41% of all US online sales, according to research firm eMarketer. But the company has also pioneered cloud computing services and is a force in advertising, where it competes with giants like Google and Facebook.

In recent years, Amazon has become more deeply embedded in Americans’ daily lives through streaming services and smart devices, and those businesses have held up well even as competition has intensified. Its Alexa assistant and Fire TV streaming devices regularly rank among the company’s best-sellers, thanks in part to frequent discounts.

Large scale recruitment

Amazon is constantly hiring, and its need for more workers seems endless. The company added more than 500,000 employees worldwide in 2020 and could surpass Walmart as the largest employer in the United States in the coming years. Its massive hiring needs are due to the expansion of warehouses across the United States in an effort to deliver packages faster.

In the spring of 2020, the company hired 175,000 seasonal workers to meet the pandemic’s surge in demand. It later offered 125,000 of those workers the opportunity to stay on full-time. By September of last year, it had added 100,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada. And in May, it announced the addition of 75,000 workers.

The company has also been on a hiring spree for highly skilled, professional workers. In January, it added about 3,000 workers in Boston to serve the expansion of tech jobs in major cities. In June, it hired 800 people to work for Amazon Web Services in Redmond, Washington. The giant now has about 130,000 white-collar workers out of a total of 950,000 in the United States.

Success in Hollywood

Amazon entered the film industry in 2010 with the launch of Amazon Studios. It is now a major producer and distributor of feature films and television series. Amazon has invested more in this division in recent years.

Some of Amazon's most successful titles include "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," a series about a housewife who becomes a comedian in the 1950s. The series ran for three seasons and became one of Amazon's most popular titles. It won numerous awards including Golden Globes, Emmys, and others.

This year, the 2020 film "Sound of Metal," about a drummer who begins to lose his hearing, won two Oscars, adding to Amazon Studios' Oscar collection with the previous one being 2016's "Manchester by the Sea."

Other investments

Bezos is scheduled to launch into space on July 20. In addition to space, he is gradually transitioning to a more relaxed post-CEO life, including climate-focused philanthropy and celebrity hangouts. Bezos tops the list of the world’s richest people, with a fortune of about $200 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In February 2020, Bezos announced that he was pledging $10 billion to fight climate change through his new Bezos Earth Fund initiative. The first $791 million in funding was disbursed in November 2020.

The Textile Museum building owned by Bezos in Washington DC. Photo: WSJ.

The Amazon founder also has a penchant for real estate, with his homes valued at around $300 million. In addition to his Seattle property, he has bought homes in Los Angeles, Washington DC and New York. He also owns more than 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of land in West Texas, near a Blue Origin facility.

In addition to real estate, he sells a billion dollars in Amazon stock each year to fund Blue Origin. Years ago, he gave at least $42 million to fund the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit that designed a 10,000-year clock to be installed deep inside a mountain in West Texas.

Bezos also owns at least one Gulfstream G650ER jet, which has a range of 7,500 nautical miles and can carry up to 19 people. He recently purchased a nearly 140-foot yacht with a helipad.

Amazon boss still uses homemade desk for 30 years

The photo of Bezos using the old desk was posted on his personal Instagram page by his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, on January 29. Sanchez said she took the photo when she accidentally walked into the room and saw the Amazon founder working.

"I'm glad he's still working on one of the early desks," Sanchez wrote, adding a picture of Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon for comparison.

In both photos, the billionaire is seen working at a large patchwork table. This type of table is also known as a “door table” because the tabletop is a piece of wood originally designed to act as a door, but legs have been added for a new purpose.

The article went viral immediately after being posted, with nearly 30 thousand likes and more than a thousand comments.

Many people said they admired Jeff Bezos' work ethic even in difficult conditions, or his simplicity in using a homemade desk for decades. "An engineer is an engineer," one person commented. Others said the image made them feel that Bezos still maintains the same stance as when he started his business even though Amazon has become a giant.

The “door desk” is not a special thing at Amazon, it is even a part of the culture here. In a blog post by Nico Lovejoy, one of the first employees at Amazon, in 2018, this type of desk was thought up by Bezos in 1995, when he needed to equip a small number of employees at that time.

"When he went into the hardware store, he looked at tables and doors. The doors were much cheaper, so he decided to buy them and put legs on them," Lovejoy recalled.

According to an Amazon employee at the time, Bezos was “not a good carpenter,” so the desk was “ugly and wobbly,” requiring them to put paper on it when in use. “A lot of the things we do are pretty trivial in nature, but as long as the trivial solution works,” Lovejoy said.

According to Insider , the “door desk” has become a symbol of Amazon’s culture, which emphasizes frugality at its core. Despite becoming one of the most valuable companies on the planet, modern versions of the desk are still found throughout its offices. Amazon even posts instructional videos so employees can design their own.

The site also quoted Marc Randolph, a businessman who has spoken to Bezos, as saying that the use of a custom desk was a “deliberate message.” “It’s a way to show that they’re not going to spend money on things that don’t affect their customers,” Randolph said.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and stepped down as CEO in 2021. He is now one of the richest people on the planet, with a fortune of about $184 billion.

Source: https://diaoc.nld.com.vn/jeff-bezos-va-amazon-nhung-dieu-it-nguoi-biet-196240131105518702.htm