Let’s begin by stating the obvious: $13 billion is a lot of money. It’s enough to transform lives, to help heal the environment or to fuel thousands of small businesses. $13 billion is also by how much Jeff Bezos’s wealth increased in a single day. Monday, in fact. Bezos’s net worth didn’t just grow by an absurd amount; instead, Bezos’s net worth grew by an amount that, on its own, would make someone singularly wealthy.
At Bloomberg, Jack Pitcher offers details on just how Bezos’s fortune grew by such a significant amount. Amazon’s stock price increased by 7.9% on Monday, making him that much wealthier. Pitcher puts Bezos’s fortune into perspective:
Bezos, Amazon’s 56-year-old founder and the world’s richest person, has seen his fortune swell $74 billion in 2020 to $189.3 billion, despite the U.S. entering its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. He’s now personally worth more than the market valuation of giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp., Nike Inc. and McDonald’s Corp.
Lest we forget, he’s also on track to become a trillionaire in 2026.
The Bloomberg article notes that Bezos isn’t the only very wealthy person to see their net worth increase this year. The net worth of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also increased by $15 billion since the beginning of 2020. For people who haven’t seen their wealth grow by multiple billions, however, there’s the possibility of what a recent article in The New York Times calls “prolonged economic disruption and the prospect of a slow, halting recovery.”
Subscribe here for our free daily newsletter.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
