Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (AMZN 3.45%), has seen his net worth climb dramatically in recent years as Amazon's stock has soared. As you can imagine, the vast majority of Bezos' wealth is the result of his roughly 17% stake in Amazon, but he also has several other notable assets. Because of Amazon's excellent stock performance, Bezos is close to overtaking Bill Gates as the world's richest person as I write this.
Bezos' Amazon stock is worth how much?
As of this writing (June 2017), Bezos is worth an estimated $84.3 billion, which puts him nearly at the top of the net-worth rankings, according to Forbes.
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Bezos owns 80.9 million shares of Amazon, a 16.9% stake, which makes up the majority of his wealth. Since Amazon's share price has soared in recent years, this stake now represents an enormous sum of money. At its current stock price of approximately $992, this translates to $80.25 billion worth of Amazon stock.
Not only has Amazon's stock been rising at a rapid pace over the past few years, but it also has been rather volatile recently, as you can see from this one-month chart.
To put this in perspective, in mid-May, Bezos' Amazon stock was worth $76.5 billion, and this had climbed to a peak of more than $81.7 billion shortly after the stock price broke through $1,000 for the first time. In other words, Bezos' net worth has fluctuated by $5.2 billion over the past month alone. Since the beginning of 2017, his wealth has grown by more than $20 billion, and it has roughly doubled since the market's last significant dip in February 2016.
My point is that Bezos' net worth has been, and remains, a very fluid situation. If you're reading this even a few days after publication, his actual net worth could differ by billions of dollars from its $84.3 billion level when I wrote this.
To calculate the current value of Bezos' Amazon stake (in billions), multiply 80.9 by the company's current stock price.
Other notable assets Bezos owns
As I mentioned, at the time of this writing, Forbes estimates Bezos' overall net worth to be $84.3 billion. This implies that roughly $4 billion of Bezos' wealth is in assets other than Amazon stock, and includes things like homes, cars, and other possessions.
In addition, it includes Bezos' other business ventures. He began a human spaceflight start-up in 2000 called Blue Origin, which has accelerated its development efforts in recent years. In fact, Bezos revealed that he has been selling about $1 billion of his Amazon stock annually to fund the company, which aims to begin commercial space flights in 2018. It's unclear what value the company currently has, but if successful, it could become an additional driver of his net worth in the future.
Bezos also purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in cash in 2013, and this was done separately from Amazon.
Stock-wise, Bezos was an early investor in Google (now Alphabet), and his $250,000 investment in 1998 would be worth more than $6 billion today. Bezos hasn't revealed how many shares he still owns, but this could account for a major portion of his non-Amazon wealth.
Finally, Bezos' company, Bezos Expeditions has (at least partially) funded many successful ventures, including Airbnb, Twitter, Uber, and more.
The bottom line
Since most of Bezos' more than $80 billion in wealth is in the form of Amazon stock, his precise net worth depends on the company's share price at the time you're reading this. As of this writing, Bezos is less than $5 billion away from overtaking Bill Gates as the richest person in the world, and if Amazon continues its hot streak, that's exactly what could happen in the near future.
