Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Inc, has sold $3 billion worth of Amazon shares on Monday and Tuesday, according to the new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. With this transaction, Jeff Bezos has sold over $10 billion worth of Amazon shares this year alone.
According to the documents filed, Bezos has sold 1 million shares or 1.8% of his stake in Amazon this week. The sales were part of a pre-arranged plan to sell Amazon shares in accordance with trading laws.
Bezos has sold billions of dollars worth of shares this year, and this is the third one in a series of similar transactions. Yet, the billionaire still owns more than a 10% stake in Amazon, the company which is worth more than $1.6 trillion. The e-commerce company has profited greatly this year from the spike in online sales due to the pandemic.
According to Forbes World’s Billionaires List, Jeff Bezos is currently the world’s richest person and has remained so from the last three years. As of Nov 5, Bezos’s net worth is $191 billion according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. In one of the largest single day increases, Bezos’s net worth rose by $10.5 billion on Wednesday.
The billionaire’s net worth took a hit after a divorce last year. Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, received 4% stake in Amazon as part of the divorce. Scott, is now the 13th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $62.3 billion.
Jeff Bezos is, of course, known for his e-commerce colossus Amazon and its AWS cloud services. But the billionaire entrepreneur has invested in various other domains too, such as the “Bezos Earth Fund” to which he has committed $10 billion dollars in order to combat climate change. He owns the Washington Post and is making significant investments in his aerospace company Blue Origin, which is going to rival SpaceX.
In fact, he has promised to pour $1 billion into Blue Origin every year. Back in August, he raised $3.1 billion, just a little while after the firm secured the FTC approval to build its own constellation for providing worldwide internet services, in competition to Starlink.
Along with the Blue Origins and the Bezos Earth Fund, the richest man on Earth has also contributed to numerous charities. He has promised $2 billion in 2018 to fund existing charities helping homeless families, and to start a network of nonprofit, Montessori-inspired preschools for low-income neighborhoods.
