Amazon's Jeff Bezos is 1st person to be worth $200 billion

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, already the world's wealthiest man, just became the first and so far the only person to have a fortune exceeding $200 billion.

According to Forbes, the 56-year-old Bezos' net worth is currently at $204.6 billion, crossing the $200-billion mark after Amazon's stock went up by 2% Wednesday afternoon, pushing his fortune up by $4.9 billion.

When the market closed, his fortune was at $205 billion.

The 55-year-old Bezos founded Amazon in his garage in 1994 and went on to grow it into a colossus that dominates online retail, with operations in streaming music and television, groceries, cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and more.

His other businesses include The Washington Post newspaper and the private space firm Blue Origin.

While Bezos has long been in the public eye because of Amazon's growth and his billion-dollar fortune, he was thrust into the spotlight with his announcement in January last year that he and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, were divorcing.

Bezos' penchant for experimenting reportedly dates to a young age—with one widely shared story recounting how he tried to dismantle his own crib as a toddler.

His mother was a teenager when she gave birth to Bezos in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964.

She remarried when her son was about four years old, and he was legally adopted by his Cuban immigrant stepfather who worked as an engineer at a major petrochemical company.

His mother's family were settlers in Texas, where Bezos spent many a summer working at a ranch owned by a grandfather retired from a job as a regional director at the US Atomic Energy Commission.

Bezos was enchanted by computer science when the IT industry was in its infancy and he studied engineering at Princeton University.

After graduating, he put his skills to work on Wall Street, where by 1990 he had risen to be a senior vice president at investment firm D.E. Shaw

He surprised peers by leaving his high-paid position about four years later to open an online bookseller called Amazon.com, which according to legend was started in a garage in a Seattle suburb. Bezos was backed by money borrowed from his parents.

Bezos went from being a boy with a love for how things work to being the man who built Amazon.com into an internet powerhouse.

Amazon lost money for many years as Bezos insisted on investing revenues for future growth, a plan which only recently has started to pay off. -with Agence France-Presse