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It’s a topsy-turvy time, with a topsy-turvy market.
Over 17 million Americans are unemployed in the course of three week. But that hasn’t stopped a rally in the stock market following the pass of a $2 trillion Coronavirus stimulus bill.
While small businesses around the country reel from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, others businesses are doing unparalleled numbers.
For example: Amazon. The e-commerce behemoth is reporting record sales, causing its stock price to surge to all-time highs. It’s up over 22% on the year. While the rest of the economy is a rollercoaster, that’s a pretty good place to be when you compare it against a 13% decline for the S&P 500, as reported by the Motley Fool.
This week, things got even rosier for Amazon, even with the market’s growing concerns about the overall health of the economy.
Amazon surpassed a market value of more than $1.1 trillion. Today, Amazon’s share price reached a record high, closing at $2,307.68 a share. That’s a pretty big jump when you consider Amazon’s low of 1676.71 on March 12, the date COVID-19 was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization.
Of course, this stock market upswing for Amazon has benefited the company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, immensely.
Bezos has been the world’s wealthiest person since 2017, when he overtook Bill Gates on the Forbes list.
Bezos sold about $4 billion in Amazon stock back in early February, as warning signs of the coronavirus crisis began to appear in the global economy. A couple days later, the Amazon chief bought the Warner Estate, a huge $165 million estate in Los Angeles.
With Amazon’s massive gains in the market, Bezos’ wealth has increased by roughly 20% since the beginning of the year. That’s amounted to about a $24 billion gain in Bezos’ overall net worth.
At market closing today, Forbes reports that Jeff Bezos is worth $139.4 billion.
It’s also a huge gain for his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, who has a 4% stake in Amazon following the finalization of the couple’s divorce in 2019. She’s not worth an estimated $45 billion, putting her in the Top 20 wealthiest people in the world. via Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg:
Leading the group is Bezos, who has added almost $24 billion to his fortune in 2020, as well as MacKenzie Bezos, who was left with a 4% stake in Amazon as part of the couple’s recent divorce settlement. Her net worth has climbed $8.2 billion to $45.3 billion, and she’s now No. 18 on the Bloomberg wealth ranking, ahead of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person, and Mexico’s Carlos Slim.
Despite the big boom in net worth, not all is rosy in the Amazon empire. This comes at a time when Amazon is shutting down operations in France due to concerns around the pandemic, while concerns in the United States grow over working conditions as an increasingly amount of Amazon warehouse workers test positive for COVID-19.