Jeff Bezos becomes the first person ever worth $200 billion
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire CEO of Amazon and richest person in the world, now has a fortune that exceeds $200 billion, Forbes and Bloomberg reported. Forbes estimated that Bezos was worth $204.6 billion when the markets closed Wednesday, while Bloomberg pegged his wealth at $202 billion.
Early Wednesday he crossed a milestone previously unseen in the nearly four decades Forbes has been tracking net worths
It's a status that hasn't been reached before, even when adjusted for inflation.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $116.1 billion, now trails Bezos by a distant $88.5 billion. Gates' $100 billion fortune at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999 would still be worth $158 billion in today's dollars just three-quarters of what Bezos currently worth Forbes reported.
Bezos' fortune is also the equivalent of 1% of US gross domestic product, which sat at $21.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2020 but dropped to $19.4 trillion last quarter, according to the Department of Commerce .
Amazon has experienced a surge in online sales during the COVID-19 pandemic as people turn to online shopping while inside their homes, sending the company's market capitalization through the roof. It's now valued at $1.7 trillion.
Last quarter, Amazon blew past Wall Street's expectations , reporting $5.2 billion in net profit, even after warning investors it would spend all of the $4 billion it had expected to make for the quarter on COVID-related initiatives.
As a result, Bezos has seen his net worth nearly double during the pandemic: jumping by $97 billion from pandemic lows in early March, according to Bloomberg .
Most of Bezos' wealth comes from his stock in Amazon, in which he has an 11% stake, according to 2020 SEC filings cited by Bloomberg. He also owns The Washington Post and the space exploration company Blue Origin, which competes with the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Bezos would be even richer had he not gone through the most expensive divorce settlement in history last year. When he split from ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, last July, he agreed to give her 25% of his Amazon stake, a chunk of stock now worth $63 billion. Even after giving away $1.7 billion in charitable gifts earlier this year, Scott is currently the world's 14th-richest person and second-richest woman, behind L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers.
Bezos isn't alone among tech titans with fortunes surging to massive new heights. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg ended Tuesday as a brand-new centibillionaire, worth $103.1 billion after adding $3.4 billion to his fortune in one day, on Facebook stock gains. That surge continued early Wednesday afternoon, with Zuckerberg up an astonishing $6 billion just on Wednesday as of publication time. He's now worth $109.1 billion.
There are now more centibillionaires on the planet than ever. Joining Bezos, Gates and the newly crowned Zuckerberg is LVMH chair Bernard Arnault, who first joined the 12-figure ranks last year. Though his net worth slipped to about $80 billion at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in March, Arnault reclaimed the centibillionaire title in May and today is worth about $115 billion. This makes him the third-richest person on earth–$90 billion poorer than Jeff Bezos.