Jeff Bezos returns to the top of the world's richest men. The founder and major shareholder of Amazon is regaining the crown he lost at the end of 2021 after overtaking Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The businessman's fortune is $200 billion (184 billion euros), while that of the head of Tesla and SpaceX is $198 billion (182 billion euros).
The good performance of Amazon on the stock market, up 89% in the last 12 months and 18% in 2024, and the decline of Tesla (24% so far this year and 3% in 12 months) have it Bezos allows you to return to first place in the rankings. The podium is very close, as third place belongs to LVMH's largest shareholder Bernard Arnault with $197 billion.
According to Bloomberg estimates, Bezos' wealth has risen by $23.4 billion so far this year, while Musk's fortune has fallen by $31.3 billion. For his part, Arnault increased his wealth by 18 billion in the last two months of the year thanks to the 15 percent increase in the LVMH stock market.
However, the biggest attraction of this beginning of the year is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and boss of Meta, whose fortune has increased by $50.7 billion thanks to the good development of the company, putting him in fourth place with a total of $179,000 million. Bill Gates is in fifth place with 150,000 million, up 8,800 in 2024. Jensen Huang, co-founder and shareholder of Nvidia, the stock market's top performer in the last 12 months, is also on the rise. So far this year alone, his wealth has increased by 31 billion to 75,000. The highest-ranked Spaniard is Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, 16th, with $88.9 billion, and the richest Latin American is telecommunications and financial entrepreneur Carlos Slim, 14th, with $103,000 million.
Bezos made money this year by selling 50 million Amazon shares. The founder of the e-commerce and cloud computing giant pocketed $8.5 billion. Sales prices ranged from a low of $165.87 per share to a high of $175.34. The transactions took place over nine consecutive business days beginning February 7.
The businessman did not explain the reasons for the sales, which came shortly after he moved his home from Seattle, Washington, to Miami, Florida. Washington state implemented a 7% tax on capital gains in 2022. In Florida, on the other hand, this tax figure does not exist, since these are shares of the founder, where virtually the entire sale amount is capital gains. Bezos can save almost $ 600 million in taxes by selling as a resident of Miami.
The founder of Amazon has sold more than $30 billion worth of shares in the company he founded since 2002. Bezos remains the company's largest shareholder with 9.3% of the capital, followed by Vanguard, which controls 7.46%, as recently reported, and BlackRock, which recently stated that it owns 6.1% of the capital.
The founder of Amazon announced on November 3 that he was leaving Seattle, the city where he had spent most of his life, as he himself stated via his Instagram account. He said he was moving to Miami to be closer to his parents and the operations of his space company Blue Origin. Bezos last year bought two adjacent villas on Indian Creek, an artificial island in Miami known as a billionaire bunker with 41 apartments and a golf club covering 1.2 square kilometers. He paid $68 million for the first and another $79 million for the second.
Elon Musk's fortune, meanwhile, has fallen by around $100 billion after reaching a peak of $300 billion in 2021, reflecting Tesla's poor stock market performance since then. His assets also include stocks he received as part of a record compensation program worth $56 billion. A judge in Delaware has voided this stratospheric stock bonus, but the ruling is not yet final and has not been enforced.
Musk and Amazon are rivals in the space business, where SpaceX has a big advantage over Blue Origin thanks to its satellite launch business using reusable rockets and its Starlink communications satellite network. Musk's semi-official biographer Walter Isaacson told EL PAÍS in an interview a few months ago about his opinion of his rival: “Musk competes with Bezos, but he thinks it's great that Bezos makes rockets.” I think he's trying to apply pressure so that he becomes more competitive. “He believes Bezos spends too much time on vacation and that's why he failed to put a rocket into orbit, but in reality Musk admires Bezos for trying and wants him to do it with his rocket company has more success,” he said.
Follow all information Business And Business on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter
The five-day agenda
The most important business quotes of the day, with the keys and context to understand their significance.
RECEIVE IT IN YOUR EMAIL