With his net worth topping $150 billion, Jeff Bezos is now the wealthiest person in modern history.
That’s according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which as of Tuesday showed that the Amazon CEO is more than $55 billion ahead of the world’s second-richest person, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose net worth stands at $95.3 billion.
Bezos reached the $150 billion mark Monday, making him richer than anybody else since 1982, when Forbes first published its annual wealth ranking, according to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg index is a daily wealth tracker.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. The Seattle company has since grown from an online bookseller to the world’s richest retailer, and is also a massive cloud computing company.
Bezos reached his wealth milestone as thousands of Amazon warehouse employees in Europe are on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. Amazon has long faced such protests.
An Amazon spokeswoman said the company “provides a safe and positive workplace with competitive pay and benefits from day one.”
As for Bill Gates, he would be worth about $150 billion today if it weren’t for his philanthropy, Bloomberg notes. Gates has donated almost 700 million Microsoft shares, $2.9 billion of cash and other assets since 1996, according to Bloomberg analysis.
With Amazon’s stock up more than 55 percent so far this year, the net worth of Bezos — who also founded rocket company Blue Origin — has skyrocketed by $52 billion. That gain is worth more than the total wealth of Asia’s richest person, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma. Bloomberg also noted that Bezos’s individual wealth almost equals the $151.5 billion controlled by the Waltons of Walmart fame, the world’s richest family.
This is how Bezos stacks up compared with the world’s other wealthiest people, including names familiar to Silicon Valley:
—Mark Zuckerberg is No. 4 on the list. The Facebook CEO was No. 3 just over a week ago, passing investor Warren Buffett. But because of the ups and downs of the stock market, Zuckerberg’s $82.8 billion net worth trailed Buffett’s $83 billion Tuesday.
—Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, are Nos. 8 and 9 on the Bloomberg index, with net worths of $57.7 billion and $56.2 billion, respectively.
—Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, is No. 10 with $54.8 billion.
—Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX co-founder, is No. 42 with $20.5 billion.
—Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder, is No. 44 with $20.1 billion.
—Laurene Powell Jobs is No. 49 with $19.7 billion. Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective, businesswoman and philanthropist, is the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
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