Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world yesterday morning, until he was rather quickly dethroned. The fall from grace was a fairly rapid one for Jeff Bezos, whose time on top of the rich list lasted all of 12 hours.
Which to be fair to him is more than any of us will ever have.
On what would have been a good Thursday for Bezos, markets opened and Bezos had a net worth of $90.6 billion, putting him $500 million ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.4 billion to Bezos’ net worth.
This then fell back down to $88.5 Billion. The absolute travesty!! Bezos quickly slipped to second best when Amazon reported its second quarter earnings showing a profit of $197 million on strong sales of $38 billion.The dip in profit is a 77 per cent drop from $857 million this time last year. Though this was mainly due to Amazon’s investments in its own business.
Still though, Bezos rise to the top is pretty impressive, considering that 22 years ago he was just selling books out of his garage. Bezos would be nowhere close to being the world’s wealthiest person if Bill Gates hadn’t given so much of his fortune to philanthropy.
Gates and Warren Buffett, Gate’s usual competitor for the top spot of the rich list, created the Giving Pledge. Which was to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes. As such, Gates has given away $31.1 billion over the course of his lifetime through end of 2016.
In 1987, according to Forbes, there were 140 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $295 billion. Now, billionaires number 2,043 and have a combined $7.7 trillion. In fact there were more new billionaires in the world in 2016 (233), than the entire population of billionaires in 1987.
So really, logic dictates that one of us are bound to become billionaires any day now. Right?!
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