Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen.

The Jorgensens were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child.

He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos became D.E. Shaw's youngest vice president.

While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the Internet market by opening an online bookstore.

In the 20 years since Amazon went public, Bezos has sold at least $70 billion worth of his shares. He sells roughly $1 billion worth of shares every year as part of a planned stock sale arrangement.

The day Amazon went public, Amazon's stock topped out at $18 and Jeff was left with a net worth of $12 billion. At the peak of the dotcom bubble, Amazon stock topped $106 per share. After the bubble burst, Amazon's stock price sank to an all-time low of $5 per share in October of 2001.

At that point, Jeff's net worth sank to $2 billion. At various times in recent history, a single share of Amazon traded for more than $2050. So, if you had been smart enough to take $10,000 and buy shares of Amazon in October of 2001, could have had $4.1 million before counting any dividends that they may have issued.