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Jeff Bezos's net worth is over $143 billion, making him at least $50 billion richer than any other person on Earth. This American entrepreneur, investor, computer scientist and philanthropist is best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com which is the world's largest online shopping retailer.
He owns nearly 17% of Amazon, which he founded in a garage in Seattle in 1994. He initially operated the company as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a myriad of products and services, most recently video and audio streaming. Amazon.com is now the world's largest web sales company on the internet, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services which is available through its Amazon Web Services division.
His other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers. In 2013, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million. He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin with test flights to space which started in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018.
"You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."
Jeff Bezos
Bill Gates was recently set to become the world’s first trillionaire within 25 years. Forbes, estimates Gates’ fortune in 2017 to be around $86 billion (£67 billion).
Gates’ wealth now has a momentum of its own and is set to accumulate even further. Oxfam said Gates’ fortune has risen 50 percent – the equivalent of $25billion (£20billion) – since stepping down from working full-time at Microsoft in 2006.
The report stated if billionaires like Gates continue to secure these returns, “we could see the world’s first trillionaire in 25 years”. Gates is predicted to hit the trillion mark by the age of 86.
Bill claims you need a basic grasp of science, engineering and economics to get on in big business. In school he bragged to his teachers that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 30; he was a billionaire by 31.
He recently warned that a bioterrorist attack which could wipe out 30 million people is becoming increasingly likely because it is easier than ever to create and spread deadly pathogens.
The Microsoft founder, who was speaking before a speech at the Royal United Services Institute in London (RUSI), warned that an outbreak of a lethal respiratory virus such as smallpox would be more dangerous than even a nuclear attack.
Mr Gates, whose charitable foundation funds research into quickly spotting outbreaks, said it was more important than ever to help foreign countries monitor diseases to prevent a global tragedy
“If you are born poor its not your mistake, But if you die poor its your mistake.”
Bill Gates
"There is no successful businessman today that has not gone through the ups and downs.”
Femi Otedola
Femi Otedola was born in 1962 in the capital of Oyo. His family was well-known in Nigeria, as his father was Governor of Lagos State in 1992-93.
In 2003, Otedola founded Zenon Petroleum and Gas Ltd. The company dealt with marketing of petroleum products and distribution. Because of his great investment activity, Zenon managed to take the biggest share of Nigerian diesel market under control by 2005. Then, in 2007, they got an approval from banks to get a loan for building the largest premium motor spirit storage facility in Africa.
Later that year Zenon acquired almost 29% stake in African Petroleum, which is one of the largest fuel marketers in Nigeria. After some time, Otedola became a chairman of Africa Petroleum. He has become extremely rich and in 2009, was listed in Forbes. In 2010, the name of African Petroleum was changed to Forte Oil Plc. In 2015, they sold 17 % of equity to Swiss commodity trader, giving the company access to the global commodity markets.
According to an October 17, 2016 post, Otedola's net worth dropped to $550 million from $1.8 billion after a large share price drop in Forte Oil.
Otedola has a wife, called Nana Otedola. They also have three wonderful daughters and a son. One of his daughters, Florence Otedola, is also known as DJ Cuppy. She has become an international music producer and DJ. Moreover, she is also a tourist ambassador for Nigeria. His other daughter Temi, is a designer and style blogger.
Michael Jordan may be the greatest basketball player in history. He led the Chicago Bulls to six National Basketball Association championships, twice doing it in three consecutive years. His season scoring average of 30.1 points per game is the highest in the league's history. And he won five Most Valuable Player awards, as well as making the all-league defensive team in nine of his 15 seasons.
But Michael Jordan has become much more than a basketball player. Today, he is a sport icon, one of the best-known athletes in the world. His fame has transcended his sport and transformed him into a marketing mega-power. His Brand Jordan with Nike is approaching a $500-million-a-year business worldwide.
But now, years after leaving the NBA and his final stint as a player with the Washington Wizards, Jordan has decided to speak out, not just about basketball, but his business goals, his personal pleasures and, most of all, his private life.
Said basketball great Michael Jordan on why he is lowering the price on his super popular Air Jordan brand sneakers.
MJ is sick and tired of blacks killing blacks over his high priced shoes. He wants to set a precedent by showing people that spending more money on something exclusive doesn’t make you special it just makes you a fool with money. Michael Jordan feels bad for all these young black males with these large Jordan shoe collections but they don’t have one red cent invested in Jordan or Nike Stock and he would like to save them from themselves. He will make the transition in lowering the prices nationwide slowly over the course of the next couple years to deter any backlash in the black community.
"I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed."
Michael Jordan
"Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind."
Richard Branson
Ben Graham published Security Analysis, one of the greatest works ever penned on the stock market. At the time, it was risky; investing in equities had become a joke (the Dow Jones had fallen from 381.17 to 41.22 over the course of three to four short years following the crash of 1929).
It was around this time that Graham came up with the principle of "intrinsic" business value - a measure of a business's true worth that was completely and totally independent of the stock price. Using intrinsic value, investors could decide what a company was worth and make investment decisions accordingly. His subsequent book, The Intelligent Investor, which Warren celebrates as "the greatest book on investing ever written", introduced the world to Mr. Market - the best investment analogy in history.
"We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds."
Warren Buffett
“If you don’t give up, you still have a chance. Giving up is the greatest failure.” Jack Ma
The man known in the West as Jack Ma was born Ma Yun in 1964 in Hangzhou during China’s Cultural Revolution, during which his family was persecuted because of his grandparents, who were members of the Nationalist party that opposed the Communist party. If few things can characterize Jack Ma's background, education and path to success, they are failure, rejection, fighting, resolve, hard work, agility and vision. All throughout Jack Ma's life, from childhood till building a multibillion-dollar global ecommerce technology giant, he has failed many times, been rejected and called crazy, even by his father who warned him about his unique “dangerous” ideas that could have resulted in his imprisonment in an earlier generation.
Jack Ma has learned more from his and others' failures than through the traditional channels of education. Ma, a man of incredible resolve, has learned to fail better and fail forward. As he declared in an interview with Charlie Rose in Davos, "I failed a key primary school test 2 times, I failed the middle school test 3 times, I failed the college entrance exam 2 times and when I graduated, I was rejected for most jobs I applied for out of college. (Ma was the only one out of 5 applicants to the police force to be rejected and the only one of 24 applicants to be a KFC manager to be rejected. "I applied for Harvard ten times, got rejected ten times and I told myself that ‘Someday I should go teach there.’" In the late 1990s after starting Alibaba, Ma tried to get venture capital funding in Silicon Valley for Alibaba and got rejected for running an unprofitable business model. He eventually went back to China without funding.
In 2014, in what turned out to be the largest initial public offering to date, Ma and his team successfully raised in excess of USD 20 Billion for Alibaba by listing it in the NYSE stock exchange in the United States. That made Alibaba, a 15 years old e-commerce company that has its origins outside of the United States, one of world's largest companies as measured by its market capitalization that was approximately USD 200 Billion. Ma and his team are turning Alibaba holding group into a massive conglomerate by acquiring many smaller companies from technology related to logistics and beyond.
Jack Ma intends to use the internet and Alibaba’s influence to facilitate more globalized trade across borders beyond China and to help SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) across the world. Ma vows that helping SMEs to succeed is much like a religious calling for him.
Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is North America's first multi-billionaire black person. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
Oprah was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
The power of Oprah's opinions and endorsement to influence public opinion, especially consumer purchasing choices, has been dubbed "The Oprah Effect". The effect has been documented in domains as diverse as book sales, beef markets, and election voting. Late in 1996, Oprah introduced the Oprah's Book Club segment to her television show. The segment focused on new books and classics and often brought obscure novels to popular attention. The book club became such a powerful force that whenever Winfrey introduced a new book as her book-club selection, it instantly became a best-seller.
"The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams."
Oprah Winfrey
"Helping people suceed is our passion." Lawrence Colbert, CEO
DREAM | STRUGGLE | VICTORY
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