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Bill Gates Is No Longer The World's Richest Person After Amazon Stock Surge (cnn.com)
"Jeff Bezos has leapfrogged Bill Gates again for the title of world's richest billionaire..." announced CNN Money. An anonymous reader quotes their report.
Amazon stock jumped 13.5% on Friday after the company turned in another incredible earnings report -- more than a quarter-billion dollars in profit in three months. Bezos owned nearly 80 million shares in Amazon as of August, according to the most recent available data from FactSet. He made more than $10 billion from the one-day stock surge and is now worth well over $90 billion. At the end of trading on Thursday, Gates occupied the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88 billion. Bezos had $83.5 billion, and his big day on Friday was more than enough to close the gap.
In July sales for Amazon's self-created holiday "Prime Day" were actually higher than they were on Black Friday. Amazon's sales for the quarter were $11 billion higher than they were a year ago -- increasing 29% even before an additional $1.3 billion from Whole Foods sales, for total sales over three months of $43.7 billion.
Amazon now also projects that their yearly revenue from AWS will be $2 billion higher.
In July sales for Amazon's self-created holiday "Prime Day" were actually higher than they were on Black Friday. Amazon's sales for the quarter were $11 billion higher than they were a year ago -- increasing 29% even before an additional $1.3 billion from Whole Foods sales, for total sales over three months of $43.7 billion.
Amazon now also projects that their yearly revenue from AWS will be $2 billion higher.
As of four years ago, Bill Gates had already given away $28 billion, and has given away more since then. Jeff Bezos gives away very little of his fortune, favoring the same "I can use my money to make more money and do more good later" path his company follows. If Bill hadn't given away a large portion of his money, he would still easily be #1.
Neither Bill or Jeff are the richest person in the world and never were. Valdimir Putin is richer than both put together (love that revolution) and there are individuals and families throughout south Asia that could buy out both of them with pocket change.
There is a lot to wealth besides stocks traded publicly on U.S exchanges.
If you want to wallow in superficial American media fantasies that's fine but it doesn't make anyone smarter.
If you think it doesn't matter consider the fact that Trump is widely regarded as a rich guy but if his and his whole family's balance sheet were accurately reported he would probably have negative net worth. Do you think the glassy-eyed crowds would have voted for him in such big numbers if that was how he was generally known? I sure don't.