Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has overtaken Bill Gates and is now the richest
person in the world, with a fortune topping $90 billion for the first
time ever.
When markets opened on Thursday, Bezos had a net worth
of $90.6b, putting him $500m ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.4b to Bezos’ net
worth. That was enough to put him ahead of Gates, who was last surpassed
on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days nearly a year ago by
Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega.
Forbes
started tracking billionaires around the globe in 1987. Bezos is now the
seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the
third American to top the global ranks besides Gates and Berkshire
Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
While Gates and Buffett both
appeared on Forbes’ first ranking of America’s 400 Richest people in
1982, Bezos is a newer addition to Forbes’ wealth rankings. He first
appeared on the Forbes 400 in 1998, a year after Amazon went public,
with a $1.6 billion fortune. Bezos ranked third richest in the world on
Forbes 2017 list of the World's Billionaires, published in March, with a
fortune of $72.8 billion.
Bezos would be nowhere close to being
the world’s wealthiest person had Gates not given so much of his fortune
to philanthropy. Gates, who created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to
encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to
charitable causes, had given away $32.9 billion over the course of his
lifetime through end of 2016. Forbes estimates that Bezos, who has not
signed the pledge, had given approximately $100 million to charity
through the end of 2015. In June, Bezos tweeted out a request for ideas
for his philanthropy, garnering thousands of responses.
Bezos attended Princeton and then worked at a hedge fund before
starting his online bookseller in a garage in Seattle in 1994. Amazon
has since grown into an online retail behemoth selling a wide range of
products. It also offers cloud services through its Amazon Web Services
division, known as AWS. Outside of his day job, Jeff Bezos owns
aerospace company Blue Origin and the Washington Post.
Gates
fortune is built on software firm Microsoft, which he founded in 1975
with his friend Paul Allen. Gates has sold off much of his Microsoft
stake but still owns about 2% of the company's shares, worth about $12.4
billion -- just under 14% of his fortune. His investment firm Cascade
Investments has ploughed Gates' money into a wide variety of assets,
including public stocks, real estate, private equity and venture
capital. Gates owns stakes in companies as diverse as Canadian National
Railway, hygiene technologies firm Ecolab and Mexican Coke bottler
Femsa.
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