Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks to Amazon’s success, CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world, worth $207 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But when he started Amazon as an online bookseller in 1994, Bezos thought it was likely that his business would fail.

“I thought there was a 30% chance that we might build a successful company,” Bezos told John Stofflet in an interview for KING-TVs “Evening Magazine” in 2000. “I never thought we’d build what Amazon has turned into, and I’m the most surprised on the planet.”