Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos this week sold off $2 billion worth of shares in the e-commerce behemoth he started out of his Seattle garage in 1994, continuing his multi-year strategy of methodically divesting his stake in the company he built from the ground up. The sale of exactly 12 million shares, representing just over 1 percent of his total Amazon holdings, inches the 56-year-old Bezos closer to reclaiming the coveted top spot on global rich lists from arch-rival Elon Musk, the 49-year-old CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
While Bezos has cashed out billions of dollars worth of Amazon stock annually since 2019 as part of a planned sell-off program, this week’s $2 billion sale was particularly timed, coming on the heels of a sharp surge in Amazon’s share price over 2023 that has propelled his net worth up by $22.6 billion year-to-date. That rally vaulted his total wealth to within $5 billion of Musk’s in the race for the title of the world’s richest person. Musk has held bragging rights as the wealthiest human on the planet since 2021, when he unseated Bezos after the latter’s net worth briefly dipped under $200 billion.
Bezos’ carefully-plotted sell-off reduces the gap between his and Musk’s fortunes to around $9 billion, putting the crown of the world’s richest individual tantalizingly within reach once again. While Musk maintains a roughly 13% stake in Tesla worth $73 billion along with holdings in his other companies like SpaceX, Bezos owned 988 million Amazon shares worth $168 billion at the end of 2022, just shy of 10% of the e-tail juggernaut he built from the ground up starting as an online bookseller.
