Jeff Bezos is now the second richest person in the world

Topline

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos overtook Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison as the world's second-richest person in Forbes' real-time billionaire ranking, behind Elon Musk, after Amazon shares jumped on Friday.

Important facts

Important background

Amazon reported quarterly earnings after the market closed on Thursday, reporting earnings per share of $1.43 and revenue of $158.9 billion. The stock jumped as the company's international sales segment and cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, reported record operating margins. Investors and analysts had been bracing for possible disappointment ahead of the earnings release as they worried about the company's operating results and additional costs related to Project Kuiper, the satellite project in which the company has invested billions. “It just didn’t happen,” Williams Blair analysts Dylan Carden and Arjun Bhatia wrote in a note after the results were released. Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 to become chairman, owns nearly 10% of the company. He also owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops rockets and briefly flew into space in July 2021. His ex-wife MacKenzie Scott (worth $37.1 billion) received a 4% stake in Amazon as part of their divorce in 2019 – her estimated net worth increased by about $2.3 billion as of Friday.

tangent

After a busy week of earnings for big tech companies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's estimated net worth fell below $200 billion on Thursday – making Musk, Bezos and Ellison the only billionaires above that mark – even though the social media giant was trading after the market closed reported a significant increase in profits on Wednesday. Investor concerns about spending continued as its hardware division Reality Labs, which is responsible for products like the Meta Quest VR headset, posted a loss of $4.4 billion and the company raised its capex forecast to $38 40 billion US dollars. “Our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect we will continue to invest significantly there,” Zuckerberg said in a call with analysts on Wednesday.

Further reading

Amazon Earnings: Stocks Rise as E-Commerce Giant Beats Expectations (Forbes)