Since 2013, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates has remained as the world’s richest person that it has become almost like normal for him to hold the position unchallenged.
Nevertheless, the challenge came after a surge in Amazon.com Inc. shares Thursday morning in advance of the online retailer’s earnings report briefly propelled founder Jeff Bezos to beat Bill Gates as the world’s richest person.
See Also: Company to Begin Installing Microchips In Employees
There was hardly a time better for Amazon.com Inc. than now even as the company keeps extending its frontiers.
Shares of the online retailer fell 0.7 percent to $1,046 at 4 p.m. in New York, after climbing as high as $1,083.31 four hours earlier, which gave Bezos a net worth of $92.3 billion. Gates had a net worth of $90.8 billion as of the Wednesday close.
Essentially, the reign of Bezos as the world’s richest man was only but for a few hours before bill gates took over to continue from where he stopped.
Bezos remains ranked second on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind the Microsoft Corp. co-founder.
Nevertheless, it is expected that even if he hadn’t taken over briefly, in the coming days, Bezos would likely take over on a permanent basis,
53, Bezos owns about 17 percent of Seattle-based Amazon, which had surged 40 percent this year through Wednesday, helping to add $24.5 billion to his net worth.
Here are some facts to Know
- For 7 years Bill Gates has remained as the richest man on the planet.
- In the past 23 years, Bill Gates has held the richest man position for as much as 18 years.
- At the beginning of the year, the Amazon big man was the world’s fourth-wealthiest person. Since then, he was able to outrun people like Warren Buffett and Inditex SA founder Amancio Ortega, 81, who ranks third with $82.7 billion.
- Bezos started selling books from his garage when he was 31 years old.
- The Amazon CEO has been a billionaire for the past 20 years
- In the past 30 years, Bezos is only the sixth man to hold the “richest person”. What this means is that there are only 5 men that have been the richest in the world for the past 30 years, until recently.
- It has been projected that Amazon may just become the world’s first trillion-dollar company
- As it goes, the brief richest man may just become the richest man ever, as he may be worth $100 billion one day.
- According to Forbse, there were 140 billionaires in the world in 1987. All of them had a combined net worth of $295 billion. Today, there are 2,043 billionaires and they have a combined $7.7 trillion.
- Bezos owns The Washington Post and founded Blue Origin, the space-travel company.
