ETNA TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- On the eve of his annual state of the state address, Gov. John Kasich took a victory lap at an Amazon fulfillment center his administration helped locate east of Columbus. The online retailer employs 3,000 people at the 855,000-square-foot building it opened east of Columbus in September.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has entered more rarefied air, having leapfrogged billionaires Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the second wealthiest person in the world. Bezos -- CEO of the e-commerce retailer and cloud services provider -- last week enjoyed a jump of $1.5 billion to $75.6 billion net worth, after his company announced a deal to acquire Souq.com.

"What I'm about to show you," Jeff Bezos says, "is the culmination of the many things we've been doing for 15 years." The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company's spiffy new headquarters just north of downtown Seattle.

Washington's Kalorama neighborhood just keeps getting swankier: Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos has bought the former Textile Museum, a 27,000 square-foot property, intending to convert it into a single-family home, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

Amazon this morning announced the launch of Amazon Cash, a new service that allows consumers to add cash to their Amazon.com balance by showing a barcode at a participating retailer, then having the cash applied immediately to their online Amazon account. The service will support adding any amount between $15 and $500 in a single transaction, Amazon says.

For a company that has little use for the customs of Wall Street, Amazon ( AMZN) has no shortage of fans in the analyst community. Among them is Barclay's Ross Sandler, who recently predicted that the e-commerce giant could be the first company to achieve a market valuation topping $1 trillion.

It's no secret that Amazon is a juggernaut. The e-commerce platform is already one of the largest public companies by market cap ($425.4 billion) and boosts a stock price of almost $900 a share. But, a group of equity analysts at the Bank of Montreal think that Amazon's best days are still ahead of it and have made the stock a "new top pick."

JEFF BEZOS, 53 Founder/CEO, Amazon Last year's rank: N/A STEVE BOOM, 48 Vice president, Amazon Music Last year's rank: 83 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would make almost any list of the world's most powerful people. In retail, he's clearly on top, and in tech, he's close to it.

"The clouds surrounding Amazon.com are thickening," began the Washington Post article by David Streitfeld on February 21, 2001. In the previous year, stockholders had suddenly learned that the internet was not immune to the boom-and-bust cycles of more earthbound forms of economic endeavor, and it seemed the Seattle-based bookseller was going to go the way of Pets.com, the most infamous example of late 1990s cyberhubris.

E-commerce giant Amazon has quietly debuted a "social influencer" program in hopes of recruiting stars from YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook to tout products on its site. Amazon would choose among a pool of applicants based on factors including how many followers each one has across social media, and the quality and relevance of their posts for Amazon.com.