Bezos Says His Passions Paid Off

Richest guy on the planet Jeff Bezos, who founded e-commerce behemoth Amazon and rocket company Blue Origin, says he owes it all to his passions.

"I think we all have passions, and you don't get to choose them," Bezos told CNBC. "But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them."

For Bezos, his first passion was space.

"Ever since I was 5 years old — that's when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon — I've been passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel," he told the outlet, adding: "The idea of going to the moon was so impossible that people actually used it as a metaphor for impossibility. What I would hope you would take away from that is that anything you set your mind to, you can do."

And he funded that passion with his Amazon juggernaut.

"I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year," he said in a previous CNBC interview. "I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me."

"Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune," Bezos told Business Insider. "I am currently liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you're right, you're not going to spend it on a second dinner out."

• Trump Era's Biggest Winner Is Jeff Bezos, Presidential Nemesis
• Investors Question Amazon's Future After Bezos Divorce