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Bill Gates Is No Longer The World's Richest Person After Amazon Stock Surge (cnn.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-new-number-two dept.

"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.

12 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2, Funny

      I'm pretty sure Robin Hood never caused any bluescreen which made people lose hours of work.

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      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      it does not make him a hero in any sane view of reality.

      That view depends entirely on if you were robbed or if you were donated to.

    3. Re: Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 2

      Yes. Just as Al Capone had a life passion, so too did little Billy Gates. You seem to be under the impression that Gates got rich by legitI-mate means. Those of us who have been in High Tech as long as he has watched his criminal history unfold, realize how much damage he has cost society, and aren't blinded to the fact that all his current "phalanthropic efforts" don't turn out to be so selfless when the light of greater scrutiny is shined upon them.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    4. Re:Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

      So you are saying that the market voted with their wallets. Which made Microsoft the most popular.

      No. People were not given a choice. If you walked into a computer store in the 1990s, you had a choice of Windows, Windows, or Windows.

      Windows had the apps because it had the users. It had the users because it had the apps. That gave Microsoft monopoly power, which they badly abused in ways that were later deemed illegal, to crush competitors and sabotage open standards.

      It didn't have to be that way. The Internet was developed on open standards. Anyone can access the Web, anyone can connect a server, anyone can create a browser. The standards for transmitting content, and displaying pages is standardized. There is no good reason that it couldn't have been the same for OSes. We could've had a standard framework for GUIs and desktop apps, that would work on all platforms. Apps would not be "Windows only", and developers would not have to write in Javascript and run in a browser just to get cross platform capability.

    5. Re:Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous. by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      No, every white middle class westerner was robbed by him. Claiming "everyone" was robbed by him is stupid on the face of it.

  2. "incredible" quarter-billion profit? by klingens · · Score: 2

    Somebody please help me, but a quarter-billion of dollars in profit is 250 million dollars, right? How is that incredible? I guess for Amazon who posted losses for decades (cause they reinvested every penny into the company) any kind of profit is a good thing, but I wouldn't call 250 million a lot of profit for a company of this size.

    This mainly tells me, Bezos can't think of anything more to grow the company, not that Amazon had a good quarter.
    Or is this one of those slashdot editor gaffes?

  3. TIred of this "richest man" crap. by AlanObject · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:TIred of this "richest man" crap. by hey! · · Score: 2

      Well, estimating the wealth of someone who deals in contraband is by its very nature impossible. It's not like the file 10-Qs for their business. Their money is laundered and stashed in assets that can't be traced to them.

      Still, buying out Jeff Bezos at 90+ billion net worth isn't chump change for anyone, even Vladmir Putin is who by some estimated to have a net worth of over 200 billion.

      Also, it's probably worth questioning whether people who have to manage their assets this way are richer in any meaningful way, because in a sense those assets are not really available to them to use. Jeff Bezos could sell of most of his stock and retire to an orbiting space station if he wanted to. If Putin wanted to do that it would reveal where he's got his money stashed.

      For criminal billionaires a lot of their assets are in effect a kind of insurance. If the cops discover their Swiss bank accounts there's still that London real estate they own through various proxies. If they get their London assets there's still that box of gold ingots you stashed in your grandma's grave.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    2. Re:TIred of this "richest man" crap. by blindseer · · Score: 2

      1. Clinton got 3M+ more votes and would have won the electoral college had it not been for Comey's last minute intervention in the election.

      You don't know that. Also, a political party that knows that their nominee is under investigation by the FBI should, for the sake of keeping good relations with the voters, remove that nominee from the running. This was not a new investigation at that point, it had been building for some time. This investigation, and Comey's announcement, should not have been a surprise for the campaign as the people involved were being interviewed. Even if it was too late to switch candidates then we should have seen the Clinton campaign make their own announcement BEFORE Comey said anything so that this could not have happened so soon before the election.

      2. In spite of being the most investigated person in history no charges have ever been brought against her because there are no plausible charges to bring.

      This is still ongoing and recent events show that Clinton is not innocent at all. Perhaps she did not break any laws but we are seeing some very improper business dealings from the Clinton family, Clinton election campaign, and Clinton Foundation.

      3. There has never been a candidate that had more experience for the office than Clinton in 2016.

      Bullshit. At the time there was something like 20 governors, 50 US senators, and 200 US representatives, as well as a number of experienced Democrats as ambassadors, cabinet members, judges, academics, and prominent politicians at the state/city/local level, that the Democrats could have picked from. All of them, dozens or perhaps hundreds, had just as much of a resume to run with as Clinton. There were Democrats with decades of experience being not just elected officials but also with real and actual executive experience as mayors, as governors, as commissioned officers, or in the private sector. Clinton served 8 years as a US senator, and 4 years as Secretary of State, and nothing she did in either position was all that memorable.

      The Democrats deserved to lose with how they handled that election.

      --
      I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
  4. Mutual funds (1780) by raymorris · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're right that investing a lot in a single stock is certainly risky, especially over the short term (it's reasonable to think General Mills or Walmart will make money in the LONG term).

    The risk is greatly reduced by mutual funds, which allow small investors to easily diversify - they are investing in a hundred different companies, along with many other investors. Because they hold so many different companies, mutual funds, especially index funds, are pretty predictable. Some of their holdings will do very well, some won't, so the fund as a whole will return about 7% over inflation over a period of years.

    Where you're slightly off is the timing. Mutual funds, or investment funds as they were called, were created around 1780 by Abraham van Ketwich. So you're absolutely right on the concepts, just 200 years off on the timing.

      401(k) is a TAX rule. It says investment profits will be taxed when you take the money out to spend it, if you don't spend it before retirement age. It has nothing whatever to do with the risks of the investments people can make. You can apply the 401(k) tax rule to be extremely safe investments like US Treasury bonds, or to risky investments like startup companies or oil futures.

  5. Fair to call this obscene wealth? by newbie_fantod · · Score: 3, Informative

    His single-day profit (which, if spread out over a year, would amount to > $27 million per day) exceeded the GNP of 123 separate nations, and his estimated total wealth exceeds the GNP of 174 nations.
    http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PNB2.html/