Jeff Bezos breaks his own wealth record
The world’s wealthiest man has just become richer than anyone has ever been once again, just a year after surrendering a chunk of his fortune in the most expensive divorce in history.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, commands a net worth that rose to $171.6 billion this week, more than the GDP of Hungary or Algeria, according to World Bank estimates.
A spike in global demand for delivered items because of the pandemic has driven Amazon’s share price up by more than 50 percent this year, even as it has faced public anger and criticism over employee safety standards in its warehouses and other workplaces.
The valuation by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index broke the previous mark that Mr Bezos, 56, set in September 2018, when his holdings were valued at $167.7 billion.
Four months later he and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, announced their impending divorce.
Last June it emerged that Mr Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, the commercial rocket company, had agreed to transfer a quarter of their jointly-held Amazon stock to his former wife, equivalent to a 4 per cent stake in the company.
At the time the settlement was valued at $38 billion, instantly making Ms Bezos, 50, who married Mr Bezos a year before he set up Amazon from their garage in Seattle, the fourth-richest woman in the world.
She is now the 13th-richest person on the planet, and the second-wealthiest woman, after Françoise Bettencourt, the granddaughter of the founder of L’Oreal. Her net worth has soared to $57.2 billion, due to the surge in Amazon’s stock.
The company’s success has underscored the widening wealth gap in America during what is already the country’s most daunting economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s.
Ms Bezos announced last March that she had signed the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic undertaking devised by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and the investor Warren Buffett to convince the world’s richest people to give away half their wealth to charity during their lifetimes.
Mr Bezos has not committed to the pledge, although he tweeted that he was “proud” of his ex-wife for doing so. He has given $2 billion, just over 1 per cent of his wealth, to the Bezos Day One Fund to tackle homelessness and improve education opportunities for children in low income families.
In April, he said that he would give an additional $100 million to Feeding America, a charity that operates kitchens and food banks across the country and is the largest hunger-relief organisation in the United States.
Taking inflation into account, Mr Bezos is unlikely to be the richest person in human history just yet.
That title is widely believed to belong to Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of the Kingdom of Mali, whose realm stretched from present-day Senegal in west Africa to Chad in the centre of the continent.
On his 4,000 mile pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, the opulence of his huge caravan of attendants, slave girls, soldiers and animals astounded contemporaries. In Cairo alone his gifts of gold to the poor were so lavish that they were thought to have caused mass inflation. |
