Due to the general market trend, Amazon’s shares fell 8.8% on August 2, wiping out $134 billion from the internet company’s market value, according to Bloomberg.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index (BBI), billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest persons on the planet, has lost $15.2 billion in net worth because of the share plunge, leaving him with a still impressive $191.5 billion.
Notably, this is Bezos’ third-worst wipeout; the previous two were in April 2022, when Amazon shares fell 14%, and in April 2019, after he announced his divorce, losing $36 billion.
According to Bloomberg, the fortune of tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison (Oracle) decreased by $6.6 billion and $4.4 billion, respectively, as the Nasdaq 100 Index fell 2.4%. As their company’s shares plummeted during trading, other well-known figures, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, also lost around $3 billion in net worth. According to the BBI, the combined net worth of tech billionaires decreased on Friday, August 2, by $68 billion.
The markets have lost almost $2 trillion in value in the last three weeks as a result of several bad earnings reports, “jitters” about whether the artificial intelligence (AI) craze was overblown and concentrated in investment categories, and wait-and-see behaviour ahead of the US Federal Reserve’s rate cut announcement.
Bloomberg stated that 60-year-old Bezos has “steadily” sold Amazon shares throughout the year, placing him second only to Musk in terms of personal fortune. He sold $8.5 billion of Amazon stock over nine days in February. It further stated that in July of last month, he intended to sell 25 million shares valued at $5 billion.
According to Bloomberg’s calculation, Bezos would have sold up to $13.5 billion of Amazon stock in 2024 (including scheduled sales) during the year. He owns 912 million shares, or 8.8% of the business after the sell-off.