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- The tech industry with all its innovation, glamour, and youth can still be incredibly stressful. As companies launch, go public, and tackle turmoil, executives go gray, lose weight, and forget to buy eye cream.
- Tech execs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos were once fresh faces on the scene. Now, they’ve crafted themselves into multibillionaires while growing their businesses into worldwide success stories.
- Take a look at how dramatically these tech execs have changed since they’ve started the job.
Any time Mark Zuckerberg mentions Facebook, he often brings up how he started it in his dorm room at Harvard when he was just 20 years old. Early photos of Zuckerberg show him in a plain t-shirt, sweats, and Adidas sandals lounging on the steps of his would-be alma mater.
And although Zuckerberg’s wardrobe hasn’t changed much (albeit the slides and sweats), the company he founded has.
Today, Facebook has more than 2.3 billion users and has fought to keep its reputability as privacy scandals continue to plague the social network and Zuckerberg himself.
Take a look at how dramatically other world-famous CEOs changed over the course of their job:
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon when he was 30 in 1994. Like other famed tech execs, he started the company in his garage in Seattle.
AP
Before Amazon, Bezos was a senior vice president at D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund, until 1993 when he decided to begin selling books on the internet.
In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and in 45 different countries. And it continued to grow. Amazon went public on May 15, 1997.
Source: Business Insider
Fast forward to 2019, and Bezos, 55, is the wealthiest person in modern history, with a net worth of $150 billion. In September, Amazon briefly became the second US company to achieve a valuation of more than $1 trillion.
Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Much of Bezos’ wealth comes not from his salary but from the Amazon shares he owns. Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares in Amazon, accounting for a 16.3% ownership stake.
Source: Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" when he was 20 years old in 2004 while studying at Harvard University.
Justine Hunt/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
He then dropped out of school after his sophomore year to focus on the social network full-time. Facebook raised its $12.7 million Series A round of funding while he was barely of legal drinking age. Time magazine named him "Person of the Year" just six years later, while Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012 was the biggest-ever technology IPO at the time.
Source: Business Insider
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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- The 34 colleges that produced the most US presidents
Source: Business Insider – mgebel@businessinsider.com (Meira Gebel)