How To Rule The World Like… Jeffrey Bezos

Create the right product

The 48-year-old is one of the pioneers of the e-commerce market, founding the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com, in 1994. The site started as a bookstore but grew rapidly, and currently sells a variety of products including electronics, furniture, grocery, toys and jewellery.

Constantly innovate

Amazon.com recently introduced the new and advanced Kindle Fire HD, an upgrade to its best-selling Kindle Fire tablet device that it launched last year. The tablet, a direct competition to Apple’s iPad, captured 22 per cent of US tablet sales in nine months.

Amazon first released Kindle, a digital book reader, in 2007 and the device soon went on to revolutionise the publishing industry.

Amass a fortune

Bezos, named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, is the 25th richest man in the world, with a personal fortune of $18.4 billion, according to Forbes. His wealth is being driven by Amazon, which saw net sales rising 41 per cent year-on-year to $48.08 billion in 2011.

Up, up and away

A space buff, Bezos is also the founder of Blue Origin, a secretive entrepreneurial space research centre that aims to provide people with “affordable space travel” in the future.