During this past week --his first full week as the richest person in the world -- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sold one million of the company's shares, worth $1.1 billion, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
After accounting for the stock sale and capital gains taxes, Bezos ended the day Friday with a net worth of $93.7 billion, $4.1 billion higher than Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, now the second richest person in the world.
It's the second time this year that Bezos has sold one million shares of Amazon. The first time was in May. This recent sale was $150 million more lucrative pre-tax than the first because Amazon's share price was 12% higher this go round. After paying capital gains taxes, Bezos will pocket an estimated $840 million from this week’s sale.
At a space conference in April, Bezos explained that he was selling $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to finance his rocket company, Blue Origin. Bezos has now sold more than $2 billion pre-tax in Amazon stock this year. Last year, he sold Amazon stock worth $1.4 billion (pre-tax), while in 2015 and 2014 he sold $534 million and $351 million of stock, respectively. He is still by far Amazon's largest shareholder, with a 16.4% stake.
Bezos is richer than he’s ever been following Amazon’s positive third quarter earnings report last week, which pushed the stock to new highs and secured his spot as the world’s richest person. In July, he briefly surpassed Gates as the richest person in the world for a mere four hours before a drop in Amazon stock put him back in second place. Bezos was the still the second richest person in the world when The 2017 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans was published in October. (The Forbes 400 used stock prices from September 22). At the time, he had a net worth of $81.5 billion.
Bezos first joined the Forbes 400 in 1998 with a net worth of $1.6 billion, one year after Amazon went public.
