Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos becomes the richest person

The net worth of founder and chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, hit new peaks yesterday, following the online retailer's Prime Day sale with price cuts across a range of products. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos's net worth topped 150 billion US Dollars, making him the world's richest person in decades. 

Bezos is now far ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, with a worth of estimated 95 billion dollars. Gates saw his net worth briefly hit 100 billion dollars in 1999, but since then Bezos appears to be the only person to top



that milestone. Yet his rise has been nothing less than spectacular since 2014 when his fortune was estimated at around  32 billion dollars.

Bezos founded Amazon two decades ago as an online bookseller, and it has mushroomed into one of the world's most valuable companies.

Historically, Bezos still trails other wealthy individuals such as oil magnate John D Rockefeller and steel baron Andrew Carnegie, whose inflation-adjusted net worth would be more than  300 billion US dollars.