RICHEST PERSON IN THE WORLD
Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest person ... for a few hours. The Amazon head briefly surpassed Bill Gates on Thursday.
For a few hours, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos beat out Bill Gates to become the world’s richest man.
After the market opened Thursday, Amazon shares rose 3% to a peak of $1,083.31, driving Bezos’ net worth to $92.3 billion, compared to Gates’ $90.8 billion as of Wednesday’s close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By Thursday afternoon, Bezos was back in second place as Amazon shares slid 0.7% and dropped further after its earnings disappointed investors.
Microsoft co-founder Gates, 61, has held the top place on the billionaire list since May 2013. A year ago, Bezos, 53, was No. 5 on the list.
In March, he surpassed Warren Buffett of investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway as No. 2 wealthiest.
But on Thursday their places swapped, boosted by Bezos’ 17% stake in Amazon shares, which have rallied 40% in the last year on domination in both cloud computing and e-commerce.
Unlike many of the world’s richest people, Bezos has not signed the Giving Pledge, a campaign launched in 2010 by Buffett and Gates to encourage the world’s wealthiest people to contribute the majority of their money to philanthropic efforts.
More than 150 have done so, including many in the tech elite including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Bezos maintains a website listing some of his philanthropic investments at Bezos Expeditions. In June, Bezos asked his Twitter followers for suggestions on what he could do to make the world a better place.
“This tweet is a request for ideas,” he wrote in the tweet June 15. “I’m thinking of a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time — working on the long term.”
Some of those projects he cited in his tweet included Blue Origin, the aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company he founded, and The Washington
Post, which are “contributing to society and civilization in their own ways,” he wrote.
Bezos did not respond to a request for comment.