At the end of Monday’s trading session, Jeff Bezos once again became the world’s richest man after Elon Musk suffered a record loss on his wealth valuation.
Musk’s wealth valuation plummeted by $7.56 billion, bringing his wealth value to just $187 billion. Meanwhile, Bezos, the founder and chair of Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce company, is worth $192 billion with daily gains of $282 million.
Tesla shares fell over 4% on Monday as auto safety officials announced they opened a formal probe into Tesla’s (TSLA) Autopilot system following a series of accidents involving emergency vehicles.
Amazon, the world’s leading online retail giant, reported decent gains on Monday as customers increasingly opt to buy online due to fears of spreading COVID-19 disease.
By 2020, the 57-year-old billionaire was running a platform that was responsible for 9% of all retail sales in the world’s largest economy and 51.2% of digital retail sales.
As digitalization reshapes human behaviour and the cloud computing revolution does the same to enterprise, the leader in online retail, with its high-flying cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is only forecasted to propel higher—spelling more good news for its founder.
Shares of Amazon reflect the company’s phenomenal growth. Over 450% of the stock’s value increased from January 2016 to January 2021, and over 75% from January 2020 to January 2021 alone. Bezos owns 11% of Amazon as of 2021, making it the source of the majority of his wealth.
As part of his divorce proceedings, Bezos distributed additional shares to his ex-wife as well as selling over a million shares during the years 2017 to 2019. Bezos is listed as owning more than 70 million shares in the company’s 2021 annual meeting announcement.
Bezos also has substantial holdings in more traditional investments, such as real estate, as well as a significant number of shares in other prominent companies.
