How Covid-19 made Amazon’s Jeff Bezos the richest person in history, adjusted for inflation – now worth double Elon Musk
The Amazon CEO is now worth nearly double Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – his closest competitors in Forbes’ and Bloomberg billionaires’ ranking – but all of the tech titans are enjoying enormous increases in personal wealth, with global lockdowns proving good for those at very top
It's a sum that has never been amassed by one person before, even when adjusting for inflation.
Bezos' fortune is also the equivalent of one per cent of US gross domestic product, which sat at US$21.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2020 but dropped to US$19.4 trillion last quarter, according to the Department of Commerce.
Amazon has experienced a surge in online sales during the Covid-19 pandemic as people turn to online shopping while at home, sending the company's market capitalisation through the roof. It's now valued at US$1.7 trillion.
Last quarter, Amazon blew past Wall Street's expectations, reporting US$5.2 billion in net profit, even after warning investors it would spend all of the US$4 billion it had expected to make for the quarter on Covid-19-related initiatives.
As a result, Bezos has seen his net worth nearly double during the pandemic: jumping by US$97 billion from pandemic lows in early March, according to Bloomberg.
Most of Bezos' wealth comes from his stock in Amazon, in which he has an 11 per cent stake, according to 2020 SEC filings cited by Bloomberg. He also owns The Washington Post and the space exploration company Blue Origin, which competes with the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.