Seattle: Jeff Bezos, the executive chairman and founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, has sold more than 12 million shares of his company, worth over $2 billion, in two days. He disclosed this in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.
According to the filing, Bezos sold 1,19,97,698 shares of Amazon’s common stock on February 7 and 8, at prices ranging from $1,680 to $1,720 per share. The total value of the shares sold was $2,043,144,400. Bezos still owns 53,226,801 shares of Amazon, which represents about 10.6% of the company’s outstanding shares.
Bezos, who is the world’s richest person with a net worth of $191 billion, started Amazon in 1994 in a one-car garage in Seattle. He transformed the online bookstore into a global powerhouse that sells everything from books to groceries to cloud computing services. He stepped down as the CEO of Amazon in July 2021 and handed over the reins to Andy Jassy, the former head of Amazon Web Services. He remains the executive chairman of the company and focuses on its long-term vision and innovation.
Bezos also devotes more time to his other ventures, such as Blue Origin, his space exploration company, and the Washington Post, the newspaper he bought in 2013. He also engages in philanthropic activities, such as the Bezos Earth Fund, which he launched in 2020 with a pledge of $10 billion to combat climate change.
Bezos’s address in the SEC filing is listed as Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. However, it is reported that he is now living in Miami, where he bought a $23 million mansion in 2020. He also owns properties in Washington DC, New York, Beverly Hills, and Texas.
Bezos is not the only tech billionaire who has been selling his shares recently. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the second-richest person in the world, has sold more than $10 billion worth of Tesla shares since November 2021, after he polled his Twitter followers on whether he should do so. Musk said he sold the shares to pay taxes and donate to charity.
