Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Just Stole Bill Gate’s Title of the “Richest Man in the World’

Richest Man in the World

We all know Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is wealthy. However, until now, the question that investors were asking was: what is the exact size of his fortune? Well, now we know that Jeff Bezos has $91 billion to his name, and that makes him the richest man on Earth.

That means he’s richer than Bill Gates, but not by much, according to Bloomberg. How did he end up surpassing the Microsoft (NASDAQ:$MSFT) CEO? It’s all thanks to the bump in shares of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:$AMZN).

Over the course of the last few years, Bezos’s billions have flew past that of Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega and Carlos Slim. According to Bloomberg, Bezos accumulated more than $24 billion in net worth since January of 2017 alone.

It shouldn’t come as a total surprise that brick-and-mortar retail stores are unhappy with this news, as Bezos’s wealth is playing a defining role in putting them out of business. Securities analyst Michael Pachter said to Bloomberg that “Amazon Prime is why so much physical retail is going away.”

He added, “Anyone who joins Prime shops in retail stores 10% less, and that number will keep accelerating as Amazon adds more inventory.”

It’s not just physical retail stores that are suffering from Amazon’s growth, though, web hosting services are in a similar predicament. Bloomberg has reported that Amazon Web Services – which is the company’s cloud computing division – is the top such service in the cloud-computing sector.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has enough money to keep up his space race with Tesla (NASDAQ:$TSLA) CEO Elon Musk.

It’s important to note the following:

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos’s net worth will change depending on their respective company shares prices. As of right now, July 28, 9:20 pacific time, they are about even at 89.8B.

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About the author: Caroline Harris is a third-year student at Capilano University in North Vancouver, Canada. Having already completed an Associates Degree in Psychology, Caroline is now finishing her Bachelor's degree in Communications. In preparation for working in the advertisement sector, Caroline is writing financial content and analysis. On a daily basis, Caroline works on articles regarding the following topics: finance, cryptocurrency, technology, and politics.