Jeff Bezos Overtakes Larry Ellison As Second Richest Person In The World

Topline

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

Key Facts

Key Background

Amazon reported its quarterly earnings on Thursday after market close, reporting $1.43 earnings per share and $158.9 billion in revenue. Stock soared as its international sales segment, along with the company’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services, reported all-time high operating margins. Investors and analysts had prepared themselves for a potential disappointment prior to earnings release, due to anxiety around the company’s operating income and incremental costs around Project Kuiper, its satellite project that the company has poured billions into. It “simply did not happen,” Williams Blair analysts Dylan Carden and Arjun Bhatia wrote in a note following the earnings release. Bezos, who stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in 2021, owns nearly 10% of the company. He also owns newspaper The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets and briefly flew to space in July 2021. His ex-wife MacKenzie Scott (worth $37.1 billion) received a 4% stake in Amazon as part of their 2019 divorce—her estimated net worth jumped by about $2.3 billion Friday.

Tangent

After a busy earnings week for big tech companies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth dipped below $200 billion Thursday—making Musk, Bezos and Ellison the only billionaires above that mark—despite the social media giant reporting a big earnings beat after market close on Wednesday. Investor concerns about spending continued as its Reality Labs hardware unit, in charge of products like the Meta Quest VR headset, posted a $4.4 billion loss, and the company raised its capital expenditure guidance to between $38 billion and $40 billion. “Our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there, too,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday on a call with analysts.

Further Reading

Amazon Earnings: Stock Climbs As E-Commerce Giant Beat Expectations (Forbes)