Amazon is releasing its earnings Thursday evening. Here's how Jeff Bezos makes and spends his billions.

Jeff Bezos

Amazon is scheduled to announce its quarterly earnings results after markets close Thursday afternoon.
Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, is the first person in modern history to accumulate a fortune of over $100 billion.
He spends his $124 billion fortune on real estate across the US, a $65 million Gulfstream Jet, and his space exploration company Blue Origin.
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Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of ecommerce giant Amazon, is the wealthiest person alive — and the first person in modern history to accumulate a fortune of over $100 billion.

As Amazon readies to announce its quarterly results after markets close Thursday afternoon, Bezos has an estimated net worth of $124 billion, largely from his holdings in that company, according to Bloomberg.

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced in April that they had finalized their divorce, which was originally announced in January 2019. According to a statement from MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezos will retain 75% of the Amazon shares held by the couple, as well as their joint holdings in the Washington Post and space exploration venture Blue Origin after their split.

From real estate to space travel, here's how Bezos spends his money.

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Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the source of much of his wealth, on July 5, 1994.

Source: Bloomberg

Bezos' parents were reportedly shocked that he would give up a cushy Wall Street job in order to sell books over the internet.

Source: "The Everything Store" via Business Insider

Bezos' parents eventually came around and invested about a quarter million dollars in the fledgling company, a stake that would be worth as much as $30 billion today.

Source: Bloomberg

Bezos also received a lot of support from his then-wife MacKenzie, who negotiated Amazon's first freight contract and did the company's accounting. According to the terms of their recent divorce settlement, MacKenzie will hold a 4% stake in the company and a net worth of around $40 billion.

Source: Bloomberg

Amazon made its initial public offering on May 15, 1997. Since that day, the split-adjusted stock price has increased over 102,000%.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the source of much of his wealth, on July 5, 1994.

Bezos' parents were reportedly shocked that he would give up a cushy Wall Street job in order to sell books over the internet.

Bezos' parents eventually came around and invested about a quarter million dollars in the fledgling company, a stake that would be worth as much as $30 billion today.

Bezos also received a lot of support from his then-wife MacKenzie, who negotiated Amazon's first freight contract and did the company's accounting. According to the terms of their recent divorce settlement, MacKenzie will hold a 4% stake in the company and a net worth of around $40 billion.

Amazon made its initial public offering on May 15, 1997. Since that day, the split-adjusted stock price has increased over 102,000%.

Amazon has steadily grown over the last two decades, and now sells a wide variety of consumer products, electronics, and digital media.

Another big recent growth area is Amazon Web Services. As of February 2018, the company's cloud services was a $17.5 billion business.

Amazon has also grown through various acquisitions over time. The company's 2009 purchase of online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion stood as Amazon's biggest acquisition for about eight years.

That record was blown out of the water with Amazon's 2017 purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

The Whole Foods acquisition has dramatically boosted Amazon's push into the grocery world. A 2019 study from OneClickRetail estimates that Amazon now has an 18% share of the US online grocery market.

Bezos has made several investments in other companies, both on a personal level and through his venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions.

Bezos personally invested in Google in 1998, and his $1 million early investment would likely have made him a billionaire even without his extensive Amazon wealth.

Bezos Expeditions has invested in several startups, including blood testing biotech firm Grail, popular software developer website Stack Overflow, and Business Insider.

One of Bezos' more notable purchases in recent years was his acquisition of The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013.

Since Bezos' acquisition, the Post has greatly expanded its digital offerings, and readership has exploded.

Bezos' wealth is so massive that, according to Business Insider calculations, spending $88,000 to him is similar to an average American spending $1.

Bezos is one of the country's biggest landowners, and he and his family own five homes across the US.

One estate, with two homes on 5.3 acres of land, is located in Medina, WA, not far from Amazon's Seattle headquarters.

Business Insider's Harrison Jacobs recently visited Medina to get a sense of what the haven for Seattle's mega-wealthy was like.

Jacobs got a picture of the outside of Bezos' estate, but tall hedges and a gate blocked any view inside.

Bezos also owns a Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, California.

He also owns a ranch in Van Horn, Texas, which serves as a base for his Blue Origin space exploration company.

Bezos purchased a townhouse in Washington, DC in 2016.

Finally, Bezos' parents own three condos in the Century building at 25 Central Park West in Manhattan.

Bezos has traditionally been somewhat frugal with his ground transportation. As recently as 2013, he was still driving a Honda Accord, according to the book "The Everything Store."

However, Bezos also owns a $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet.

Bezos sometimes has a taste for exotic cuisine. The founder of ecommerce startup Woot recounted a breakfast with Bezos shortly after Amazon acquired the company at which the billionaire ordered octopus.

Bezos has not engaged in public philanthropy to the same extent as many of his hyper-billionaire peers like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who have both pledged to donate the majority of their fortunes to charity.

Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie did sign Gates' Giving Pledge in May 2019, pledging to donate more than half of her fortune during her lifetime.

Bezos has, however, supported Mary's Place, a Seattle organization that provides shelter and employment training to those who are homeless, and TheDream.US, which supports people who were brought to the US as undocumented immigrants when they were children.

According to CNBC, Bezos has also donated significant sums to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington Foundation, and Princeton University.

Bezos also supports some more unusual ventures, like the Long Now Foundation, which seeks to build a giant mechanical "10,000 year clock" underground in West Texas.

The clock is intended to be a "symbol for long-term thinking," according to a tweet from Bezos.

Bezos has been fascinated and inspired by NASA and space travel since watching the Apollo moon landings in his childhood. In 2013, Bezos funded and led an expedition to recover one of the rocket engines from the Apollo 12 mission from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bezos' most ambitious venture may be Blue Origin, his space exploration company.

Blue Origin has had several successful test flights of its reusable New Shepard rocket, and is currently developing the larger, mostly reusable New Glenn rocket system, intended to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

In the long term, Bezos intends for Blue Origin to support large-scale human spaceflight, with the goal of colonizing the solar system.

Bezos told Matthias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer, that he considers Blue Origin "the most important work [he's] doing."

Indeed, Bezos told Döpfner that he plans to spend his entire fortune on space exploration, saying "I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that."

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