Jeff Bezos No Longer World’s Richest Person

He can blame falling stock prices and that not-insignificant divorce settlement

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos: no longer the world's richest person.
Seattle City Council/Creative Commons

For a while now, one name has come to mind when referring to the world’s richest person: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The man has a massive amount of money, leading to periodic discussions of the income disparities within Amazon’s own organization. But there’s been a change in Bezos’s fortunes lately due to Amazon’s stock price dropping after announcing their third quarter results

What does that mean? Well, for starters, Jeff Bezos isn’t the richest person on Earth any more. A new report from Forbes indicates that Amazon’s stock price isn’t the only contributing factor there: Bezos’s divorce from ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos involved her receiving a quarter of her ex’s holdings in the company. 

Jeff Bezos’s drop in the rankings of the planet’s most absurdly wealthy people wasn’t exactly precipitous, mind you. He’s fallen all the way from the top of the list to…second on the list. Moving back into first is Bill Gates, who’d previously occupied that position before Amazon became the juggernaut it is today.

Alternately, as Forbes reports, we’re still dealing with massive amounts of money here.

Amazon shares fell 7% in after-hours trading, knocking Bezos’ fortune down to $103.9 billion. That puts him at number two among the world’s richest. The new number one: Microsoft cofounder and fellow Washington state resident Bill Gates, who is worth $105.7 billion.

A difference of just under two billion dollars is all that separates the two. What’s two billion dollars between hyper-wealthy friends, anyway? 

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