Why Jeff Bezos Just Sold Another $3 Billion Worth of Amazon Stock
Jeff Bezos is cashing out more Amazon stock.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s founder and CEO sold about one billion of his Amazon shares in the past week. The shares amounted to roughly $3.1 billion, priced between $3,102.85 and $3,183.26 a piece, at the time of sale.
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Early this year, Bezos dropped about $4.1 billion worth of Amazon’s stock. The latest sell-off — part of a “prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan” as declared in the filings — brings his total cash-out this year to more than $7.2 billion.
In 2019, the tech billionaire sold $2.8 billion worth of the Seattle-based business’ shares. He previously explained that he is offloading $1 billion of Amazon’s stock a year to fund Blue Origin, the privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services firm that he founded two decades ago.
Bezos, however, still owns upwards of 54 million shares in the company, which translates to approximately $170 billion in stock.
The selling spree came a week after Amazon’s chief executive testified before the House Antitrust Subcommittee, which is looking into alleged predatory business practices of some of the world’s largest technology corporations. Bezos — along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai — was questioned about purported anti-competitive practices and theft of digital content, among other concerns surrounding Big Tech’s dominance.
In May, a study from content platform Comparisun found that Bezos, who is the world’s wealthiest man, has seen his net worth grow by an average of 34% annually over the past five years. The report suggested that his net worth could top $1 trillion by 2026, which would make him the first person to ever hit that milestone.
Not only has the world yet to see a trillionaire, but there are only two companies with a valuation above the mark: Apple and Microsoft. Amazon briefly hit a $1 trillion valuation earlier this year but then dropped off. According to the data agency, the e-tail behemoth is slated to reach that landmark figure again this year.
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