Jeff Bezos Became A Billionaire After Taking This Leap Of Faith: Would You Have The Stomach For His 'Regret-Minimization' Strategy?

Jeff Bezos vaulted onto the Forbes billionaire list at 34 because he did one thing most rising Wall Street stars wouldn't risk.

What Happened: The Princeton-trained computer scientist, class of '86, left hedge-fund D.E. Shaw as a vice president in 1994 after spotting a report that "Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year." "I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast," he later recalled in a 2010 speech at Princeton.

Bezos, 30, drove from New York to Seattle, seeded the venture with $10,000 of his cash and lined up $84,000 in interest-free loans. Working from a rented garage, he launched Amazon.com AMZN on July 16, 1995. Within two months, the online bookstore was booking $20,000 a week in orders.

The company went public on May 15, 1997, at $18 a share. A year later, Amazon's soaring stock put Bezos on Forbes' rich list with a net worth of $1.6 billion.

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What To Know: Bezos' instinct to leap first has paid compounding dividends. He was the world's wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to Forbes, before ceding the crown to Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Today, Bloomberg's Billionaire index pegs him at roughly $232 billion, ranking him No. 2 globally.

Bezos often frames the gamble as a "regret-minimization framework" — a calculation that failing would sting less than never trying. Three decades later, Amazon commands a market value above $2.2 trillion and has made its founder one of history's richest entrepreneurs — all because he decided the surest path to wealth was walking away from a sure thing.

Photo Courtesy: Lev Radin on Shutterstock.com

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