The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who had taken the title as the richest man in the world in the past, might not be the person who holds that title any longer, according to multiple reports.
During after-hours trading, Amazon’s stock shares fell seven percent on Oct. 24, which brought Jeff Bezos’s total fortune down to $103.9 billion, according to Forbes. This meant that Jeff Bezos no longer held the title as the most richest man in the world—that title went back to Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, whose fortune was $105.7 billion, the financial outlet reported.
Although Bezos stocks fell on Oct. 24, the seven percent decrease wasn’t the only reason that Jeff Bezos lost his title—Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, announced that they were getting divorced back in January 2019. According to the divorce settlement, Bezos had to give his wife a quarter of their Amazon holdings in July. This made her one of the richest women in the world, according to New York Post.
According to Forbes, on the afternoon of Oct. 24, Amazon saw a 26 percent decrease in its net income during the third-quarter, which happened to be its first decline since 2017. Following that, during after-hours trading, the stocks fell almost nine percent ($1,624 per share) within 20 minutes after the market had closed. The share did recover up to $1,657 by 7:30 p.m. However, the slight recovery did little to soften the blow to Bezos who lost $7 billion from the falling stocks, according to Evening Standard.
Forbes reported that Bill Gates was the first person to have made it on the Forbes’s first list of billionaires back in 1987 having a net worth of $1.25 billion. Eleven years later, one year after Amazon went public, Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $1.6 billion, which secured him a spot on the Forbes’s 400 richest Americans, according to the financial outlet.
For 24 years, Bill Gates had held on to the title of the richest man in the world until Jeff Bezos took over that title with the net worth of $160 billion back in 2018, and held on the title until 2019, according to the financial outlet.
