According to Forbes and Bloomberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth more than $200 billion.
That makes him worth almost $90 billion more than the world’s second-richest person: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who, according to Bloomberg, has a fortune of about $116 billion. Bezos has more money than anyone else has ever had, except with inflation-adjusted, Forbes said. Gates was worth an incredible $158 billion in today’s dollars at the height of the dot-com bubble according to Forbes.
Forbes and Bloomberg also estimated that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire CEO and world’s richest, now has a fortune over $200 billion. Forbes estimated that Bezos was worth $204.6 billion when the markets closed on Wednesday, while Bloomberg pegged the wealth to $202 billion.
It’s a status that hasn’t been reached before, even if it’s adjusted for inflation.
The world’s second-richest person, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is now behind Bezos by $88.5 billion with a net value of $116.1 billion. At the height of the dotcom bubble in 1999, Gates’ $100 billion fortune would only be 158 billion now three quarters of what Bezos now value according to Forbes.
The fortune of Bezos is also 1% of US gross domestic product, which, according to the Department of Commerce, was $21.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2020, but fell to $19.4 trillion last quarter.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon has experienced a boom in online sales as people shop in their homes and sending market capitalization of the company from the roof . It’s worth 1.7 trillion dollars now.
Amazon has cut expectations of Wall Street last quarter, announcing a net profit of $5.2 billion even after alerting investors to spend $4 billion on COVID-related initiatives for the year.
As a result, Bezos’ net value during the pandemic almost doubled: he announced that in early March, he jumped by 97 billion dollars due to pandemic declines.
A study by the Center for Policy Studies last week reported that Bezos is the biggest beneficiary of the pandemic since mid-March, with the biggest rise of $24.6 billion in personal assets from pre-pandemic to $73.1 billion as of August 13, and that he has seen the highest percentage increases with an increase of 228 percent.
By comparison, US household wealth fell by 5.6 per cent in the first quarter, the largest decline since the 1950s, and more than half of US households lost their income this year.
The US had reached historic highs before a pandemic of wealth and income inequality. However, with the indication that coronavirus economic fallout is more richly concentrated, US Federal Reserve figures show that the top 1 % of Americans saw their total wealth share in the US drop, from 29.3% in the first quarter of 2020 to 27.8%, even as the top 1% reported significant gains.
In particular, those gains went to executives, founders, and early investors of the largest U.S. tech companies, which rose past Wall Street expectations last quarter. Of the 12 wealthiest Americans included in the IPS analysis, eight came from the technology industry.
