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.

Comments

Re:TIred of this "richest man" crap.

[blindseer]

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.

I do believe that Trump still would be POTUS today if it was widely reported he had negative net worth. Partly because a lot of people would believe this to be just another smear on his character, business sense, or whatnot, and be ignored. Mostly what got Trump elected was that Clinton and the Democrats were just that bad at creating a successful campaign. They ignored whole states because they were arrogant enough to think they "owned" them and didn't need to campaign further. They also ignored large sections of the demographic because they thought they "owned" them too. Clinton is not just bad at campaigning but she's got some serious charges of corruption against her. Only now, a year later, have many of the charges started to prove true because her protection from the media and deep state is starting to fall away. What did Clinton bring to the table that proved her suited to be POTUS? Her campaign was largely on how she'd be the first female POTUS, that she's a Democrat, and did I mention she's a woman?

In short Trump won because Clinton had to lose to someone, and that someone happened to be Trump.