25th October, 2019
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is about to lose his spot as the world’s richest person to Microsoft founder Bill Gates after two years of reigning.
Bezos’ slide from the number one spot may happen thanks to Amazon’s stock plummeting in after-hours trading following a miss on profit for its third-quarter results.
Amazon’s pre-market share price stands at $1,671.56 per share early on Friday.
According to Business Insider, When the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is updated at the close of trading in New York on Friday, the Amazon founder may not be the person at the top.
Bezos owns 57,657,362 Amazon shares, according to the most recent SEC filing. So, if each share is worth $1,671.56 according to pre-market trading on Friday, that would give Bezos’s Amazon stock a value of around $96 billion.
Prior to Thursday’s Amazon stock price tumble, Bezos’s stock had been valued at around $102 billion, which suggests Bezos’s overall net worth (which stood at $111 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as of Thursday) has fallen by around $6 billion, to $105 billion.
The upshot is that if Amazon’s stock price tumble holds to the market close on Friday – and provided nothing wild suddenly happens to Microsoft’s own share price – Bezos will lose his crown of world’s richest man to Bill Gates, who has a net worth of $107 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Bezos has held the title of world’s richest person uncontested since October 2017, when his net worth overtook that of Gates.