Amazon’s share price rose by more than 75 percent in 2020. The head of the online retailer has now turned more shares into cash. Jeff Bezos may need the money for his space plans – or a yacht.
Just last week, Jeff Bezos sold Amazon shares worth almost two billion dollars, and now the head of the online retailer is once again selling off more company shares in a big way.
Since the beginning of the month, Bezos has disposed of around two million shares in his company, according to documents from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Most recently, the 57-year-old parted with papers worth 1.7 billion dollars, according to Bloomberg. In total, the richest man in the world has now made money in May shares worth 6.7 billion dollars.
The sales in May took place in three tranches – and relatively shortly after Amazon had presented brilliant figures for the first quarter. The mail-order company more than tripled its quarterly profit recently – to $8.1 billion from $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Amazon’s business is doing exceptionally well, especially in the Corona crisis.
Bezos fortune estimated at $188 billion
Bezos had dumped Amazon stock on a larger scale several times in the recent past. In February and November 2020, he sold papers worth a total of more than seven billion dollars. The exact reasons for the current sale are unclear. In the past, however, he had already announced that he would be putting a billion-dollar annual sum into his rocket start-up Blue Origin. With Blue Origin, Bezos is competing with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his space project SpaceX, and he will probably have to invest heavily for this.
Blue Origin announced last week that it would launch humans into space for the first time in July – and is currently auctioning off a vacant seat. Most recently, however, the company was defeated in a Nasa tender to put Americans on the moon again. According to US media, Bezos is also having one of the world’s largest yachts built and has been investing heavily in real estate for some time.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and is still the largest single shareholder in the world’s largest Internet retailer. Amazon most recently had a stock market value of around 1.6 trillion dollars. With an estimated fortune of around 188 billion dollars, Bezos is currently the richest person in the world, according to “Forbes” and the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index”. He plans to step down as CEO of Amazon in the third quarter and then become executive chairman of the group’s board of directors. He also plans to invest billions to address the consequences of climate change.
