Jeff Bezos’ huge wealth has just broken another record. According to Forbes, the CEO of Amazon is now the first person in human history to accumulate a net worth of more than $200 billion. This milestone is accompanied by the rise of Amazon’s stock price. Although the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting the US economy, Amazon’s stock price has soared.
In the divorce agreement last year, Bezos agreed to return 25% of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott (MacKenzie Scott), which ultimately did not slow down his wealth growth.
Although Bezos increased his net assets by $87.1 billion in 2020 alone, according to Bloomberg’s latest estimates, the coronavirus crisis has become an economic disaster in other parts of the United States.
In recent months, an unprecedented 49 million Americans have applied. Unemployment benefits. Bezos is not the only billionaire to get rich in this pandemic.
Tesla’s Elon Musk and Zoom’s Eric Yuan both increased their net assets by more than US$2 billion from March to June.
From real estate to space travel, this is how Bezos spends his money. Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos) founded Amazon on July 5, 1994, which is the source of most of his wealth.
According to reports, Bezos’ parents were shocked because he gave up a light Wall Street job in order to sell books through the Internet. Bezos’ parents finally came and invested about $250,000 in this fledgling company.
The shares are now worth as much as $30 billion. Bezos also received a lot of support from his wife Mackenzie, who negotiated Amazon’s first freight contract and performed company accounting work.
According to the terms of their 2019 divorce agreement, McKinsey holds a 4% stake in the company, which is most of her $64.4 billion fortune.
Amazon conducted an initial public offering on May 15, 1997.
Since that day, the split-adjusted share price has risen 153,000% The rise of Amazon has thrown several early Internet competitors into dust.
In the first shareholder letter after the company’s initial public offering, Bezos mentioned strategic partnerships with several peers such as AOL, Prodigy and Yahoo, which have been completely closed or acquired by competitors. Over the past two decades, Amazon has grown steadily and now sells a wide variety of consumer products, electronics and digital media.
Another big growth area is Amazon Web Services. As of February 2018, the company’s cloud service business reached $17.5 billion.
Over time, Amazon has also grown through various acquisitions. The company acquired online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion in 2009, which is Amazon’s largest acquisition in eight years.
Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, setting a new record.
The acquisition of Whole Foods has greatly promoted Amazon’s entry into grocery stores. A study conducted by OneClickRetail in 2019 estimated that Amazon has an 18% share of the US online grocery market.
The rise of Amazon is the main source of Bezos’ wealth. Bezos is still Amazon’s largest shareholder, owning 11% of the e-commerce giant.
According to MacKenzie Bezos’s statement regarding the couple’s divorce, Bezos retained 75% of the couple’s Amazon shares and the voting rights of MacKenzie shares.
