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The Amazon.com empire dominates almost every aspect of our lives, from grocery shopping to streaming movies to deals on inflatable donuts to boat shoes to Spikeball. They make cheap TVs, ready-to-cook meal kits, and power the technology for the most revolutionary alarm clocks money can buy. Heck, they even distributed the greatest Grateful Dead documentary in the 50+ year history of America’s greatest rock ‘n roll band.
Amazon’s stock has soared thanks to all these smart, strategic moves, turning the company into one of the largest corporate behemoths of our era. Behind the success is Jeff Bezos, who just overtook Bill Gates as the richest man in the world thanks to a stock surge yesterday: Bezos owns 80.9 million shares in Amazon — about 17% — and he’s now worth over $90 billion. via the New York Times:
A 1 percent pop in the shares of Amazon.com — the internet company Mr. Bezos founded, which accounts for the vast majority of his wealth — was enough to bump him over the wealth of Mr. Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, according to a real-time list of billionaires by Forbes.com, which has tallied the fortunes of the uber-rich for decades.
Forbes now estimates the wealth of Mr. Bezos, currently Amazon’s chief executive, at about $90.6 billion, compared with $90 billion for Mr. Gates.
Mr. Bezos has added tens of billions of dollars in wealth — at least on paper — over the last year as Amazon shares surged more than 40 percent during that time period. They traded at about $1,063 on Thursday, ahead of the release of the company’s latest earnings report.
According to a filing with securities regulators in April, Mr. Bezos holds nearly 81 million shares of Amazon — almost 17 percent of the company. Forbes also estimates the value of his other investments — including his ownership of The Washington Post and the rocket company Blue Origin — and cash from the sale of securities as part of its wealth calculations. Mr. Bezos has said he sells about $1 billion a year worth of Amazon stock to finance Blue Origin.
Fun fact: If you bought $10,000 worth of Amazon stock when it IPO’d in the ’90s, you’d be sitting on over a fortune worth over $7 million. Who ever knew that a website that looked like this…
…Would make so many people so, so, so very rich.
Congrats on overtaking the rich guy throne, Jeff. You, sir, are an American Dream badass:
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