Battle of the US tech billionaires

Amazon boss leapfrogs Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become world’s richest man as shares in his company jump 13pc

AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos has become the world’s richest man after the value of his shares in the internet giant surged by £6.7bn.

The 53-year- old last night overtook Microsoft founder Bill Gates as his fortune rose to £69.9bn. Gates, 61, was worth £68.6bn.

Bezos’s gains came after Amazon revealed bumper sales on Thursday night of £33bn for July to September – a rise of 34pc and the equivalent of nearly £360m a day.

Amazon also reported profits of £194m, up 1.5pc on the same period last year, sending shares in the company to record highs when the stock market in New York opened yesterday. Last night Amazon shares were up more than 13pc to around $1,100 as the company led a huge rally of technology stocks on Wall St.

Other tech tycoons also added billions to their fortunes, including Gates and the founders of Google and Twitter, off the back of their own strong results.

Together, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google owner Alphabet added about £110bn to their combined value – more than the mar- ket capitalisation of BP in the UK or IBM in the US.

Andy Bryant, a technology analyst at Liberum, said: ‘It has been a simply extraordinary day on Wall Street. In many ways, Amazon has become a proxy for the growth of the internet. It is the king of e-commerce but has also become a major player in cloud computing – and knows exactly how to monetise this once-in-alifetime shift to the cloud.’

Amazon, one of the survivors of the dot-com bubble, has rapidly expanded its original e- commerce offering to include fashion, music, food and cloud computing, with rumours circulating it could also move into pharmaceu- ticals. The firm received a boost of almost £1bn from sales at Whole Foods, the upmarket grocery chain it bought this year for £10.7bn.

Amazon is also investing heavily in content for its Prime Video streaming service as it takes on rivals Netflix and HBO.

James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness, Crespi & Hardt, said he could ‘see a path to Amazon becoming the world’s first trillion dollar company’. Microsoft shares also hit a record high of around $86 after it reported sales of £19bn over three months to the end of September. The rise in the share price, of more than 7pc, boosted Gates’s fortune by some £450m.

And Google owner Alphabet smashed previous records, with shares leaping to $1,063 at one stage after it reported sales were up 24pc to £21bn over the same period, partly thanks to an advertising boost.

The Alphabet rally added a combined £3.5bn to the personal fortunes of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Twitter hit a high of $21.61, with founder Jack Dorsey becoming £26m richer, taking his total fortune to around £2bn.

Apple also attempted to join the party with bosses claiming demand for the new iPhone X was ‘off the charts’.

The device has been plagued by fears of a lack of demand after mobile operators said sales so far of the iPhone 8 – announced at the same time – had been lacklustre.

But yesterday shares in the company headed back towards the record value of $ 164.05 reached in mid-September.

Bezos’s personal fortune is thought to have increased by more than £14bn in the past year alone, compared to an increase of more than £4bn for Gates.

Bezos retains a 16pc stake in Amazon, meaning his wealth is more closely tied to the performance of his company.

Gates, whose wealth is mostly managed through his private fund, Cascade Investments, holds just 1.3pc of Microsoft.