Jeff Bezos

At the DealBook Summit, Bezos proposed retiring the Forbes list, which ranks people by their own wealth, in favor of one that ranks them by how much wealth they have created for other people. He put his own figure at 2.1 trillion dollars, generated through Amazon equity.¹

Bezos, the founder of Amazon, enters this record chiefly as the instigator of that idea about how to measure a founder's impact. A later analysis of Amazon's filings found Bezos holding about 8.8 percent, worth roughly 234 billion dollars, of a company then valued at 2.66 trillion dollars that reached its scale on almost no primary equity raised, putting his own wealth-created-for-others figure at roughly 2.43 trillion dollars two years after he first proposed the idea.¹

Separately from his role as an operator, Bezos has been a longtime minority investor in 37signals, the maker of Basecamp. Around 2005 and 2006, while roughly forty venture firms were also pursuing the company, 37signals founders David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried initially turned Bezos down, then agreed to meet him specifically because he struck them as a builder rather than, in Heinemeier Hansson's words, just a money person. The two of them then wrote the term sheet themselves, at a number Heinemeier Hansson has called almost offensively overvalued, drawing the trajectory to the moon on what was essentially a promise and expecting the whole thing to be refused. Bezos accepted it. Bezos still holds the stake, and 37signals, a company with no plans to exit, sends him a dividend check roughly every quarter.²

Bezos is also cited, through writer Eric Jorgenson, as the source of a compressed piece of advice about commitment: that a founder's plan B should simply be to make plan A work, on the reasoning that having a real fallback measurably lowers the intensity a person brings to the primary path.³