Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos is No Longer the World’s Richest Man
Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of the e-commerce giant Amazon has recently lost the title of being the world’s richest man.
Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of the e-commerce giant Amazon has recently lost the title of being the world’s richest man to Bill Gates, who grabs the top spot after Amazon’s lackluster Q3 results showed that Bezos has lost nearly $7 billion in their stock value.
Amazon shares fell 7 percent in trading on Thursday, leaving Bezos down to $103.9 billion. The current worth of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is $105.7 billion.
According to Forbes, Amazon reported a 26 percent drop in net income in its third quarter, its first profit decline since 2017. In after-hours trading, Amazon dropped nearly 9 percent to $1,624 per share.
The company has said it is investing heavily in the logistics and delivery infrastructure, with the goal of making one day shipping the norm for the Amazon Prime members. The company disclosed that during its second-quarter earnings call in July, it had spent a little bit more than the estimated $800 million that was previously decided to invest in a one-day shipping infrastructure.
Amazon, however, declined to disclose how much it had spent on the one-day shipping norms in the third quarter. But the company’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky disclosed on Thursday that the company plans to spend $1.5 billion in its fourth quarter, in order to finance its one-day shipping initiative.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, has been out of Microsoft since 2014 when he consciously stepped down as the chairman of the storied company, though he remains in the company’s board as a member. He has sold and given away the majority of his stake in Microsoft and diversified his wealth over time. He is now the co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the world’s largest private charitable foundation.
Bill Gates debuted on Forbes’ first-ever billionaires' list in the year 1987 with a net worth of $1.25 billion. Bezos who ended Bill Gates’s 24-year run as the world’s richest man in the year 2018 and became the first man on earth with wealth, the net worth of $160 billion.
Jeff Bezos first joined The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1998, one year after Amazon went public, with a net worth of $1.6 billion. In April this year, the Bezos couple has finalized their divorce settlements, which was reported as the world’s biggest divorce settlement in history, which entitled his wife and business partner MacKenzie Bezos, stocks worth around $36 billion.