On Thursday, there was a market selloff which forced Jeff Bezos to give up roughly $2 billion, and move him down from the second richest man in the world, to now being the third. This comes shortly after Bezos had dethroned Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. Prior to Amazon’s earnings for the second quarter were announced, Amazon’s stock price had surged, pushing Bezos ahead of Gates, but Amazon failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations, which brought the stock back down.
This past week, the market has started to decline, largely due to the conflict between the US and North Korea has intensified. Many stocks are down, and that includes Amazon, which dropped about 2.6% this past week. The selloff actually took out about $42.7 billion from the world’s top 500 richest people. Which is no small loss. Bezos wasn’t the only one to lose money on Thursday, however he did lose the most. Other names include William Ding of NetEase, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Jack Ma of Alibaba. Bezos still has a estimated net worth of nearly $82 billion, which is still nothing to sneeze at, but he is still about $8 billion behind Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. Gates did lose roughly $848.5 million on Thursday during that selloff.
The selloff in the stock market was the largest one since May. Now this is something that does happen from time to time. As stock markets go up, they also fall back down at some point. And where the market had been surging since the election last year – something that President Trump is more than happy to boast about – it was inevitable that the market would come down at least a little bit, in the next few months. Amazon wasn’t the only one to experience a selloff, but it’s clear that it had the biggest effect from this selloff. Seeing as Bezos did lose the most money in this selloff, compared to everyone else. However, Bezos isn’t so worried about becoming the richest person in the world, he’s looking to make the world a better place and make everything more convenient. Of course, right now his mind is set on finalizing the purchase of Whole Foods.