Most billionaires spend their fortunes buying things. Jeff Bezos decided to build rockets instead.
“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,” Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner in 2018. “Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune. I am currently liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time.”