Amazon’s Jeff Bezos becomes richest man in modern history

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in modern history.

The Amazon.com founder’s net worth broke $150 billion on Monday morning, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s about $55 billion more than Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s secondrichest person.

Bezos, 54, has now topped Gates in inflationadjusted terms. The $100 billion mark that Gates hit briefly in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom would be worth about $149 billion in today’s dollars. That makes the Amazon chief executive richer than anyone else on Earth since at least 1982, when Forbes published its inaugural wealth ranking.

His net worth has soared by $52 billion this year, which is more than the entire fortune of Mukesh Ambani, the newly crowned richest person in Asia. It also puts Bezos’s personal fortune within spitting distance of the Walton family’s $151.5 billion, which is the world’s richest dynasty.

A Federal Reserve report found the top 1 percent of U.S. families controlled 38.6 percent of wealth in the U.S. in 2016, compared with 22.8 percent held by the bottom 90 percent. Last year, Oxfam International found that more than 80 percent of earnings went to the top 1 percent of the world population.

Behind Bezos on the Bloomberg index is Gates, with a $95.5 billion fortune followed by Warren Buffett with $83 billion.

Gates would likely have a net worth of more than $150 billion if he’d held onto the almost 700 million Microsoft shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets that he’s given away, largely to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.