Amazon boss made history over Bill Gates as he top Forbes list
X
Jeff Bezos had a bumper
2017, with his net worth jumping by nearly billion in just 12 months.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of the
biggest online retail store now with a staggering net worth of $112 billion is
now the world’s richest individual, and the first centi-billionaire according
to Forbes World Billionaire list. Notably, the second place on the list, which
was bagged by serial winner Bill Gates, is at least $22 billion away with
a net worth of $90 billion while the great investor Warren Buffett got the
third position at $84 billion.
Notably, Bezos had an massive
2017, with Amazon’s stock surging to record highs in quick succession. It’s important
to note that he has topped the list for the first time-ever, in the last
120-years’ of the Forbes World Billionaire List’s history!, and he did so in a
grand style. Jeff Bezos had broken into the top three for the first time
in 2017, behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. While pipping the two greats
this year to come on top of the list, Jeff Bezos now create another notable
record- his net worth has recorded the biggest single-year increase on the
Billionaires List this century.
According
to Forbes, Bezos’ one-year gain alone comes out to about $5.26 for every living
human—enough to buy every single person on this planet a cheap wallet on Amazon
and a couple quarters to keep in it. Jeff Bezos breaks the record set by Larry Ellison in 2000, whose
net worth rose $37.5 billion in 2000 after a boom in software company Oracle’s
stock price during the dot-com bubble. Interestingly, in the process, he
has also broken his own record, a world-beating gain of $27.6 billion in 2017,
Forbes report said.
With such a stupendous rise in
fortunes, Jeff Bezos may well go on to top the list next year too, as according
to Forbes’ Real Time net worth tracker, the continued rise in Amazon’s shares
has made him richer by $15.8 billion to a net worth of $127.8 billion as of
March 7, as compared to
$112 billion in February, when the list was prepared by
Forbes. Previously, up to 2017
Bill Gates had topped the list for the fourth time in a row and held the
coveted title of the world’s richest person for 18 out of the past 23 years.
