Amazon boss Jeff Bezos cashes in £2.4bn worth of shares as pandemic boosts sales
Jeff Bezos has cashed in £2.4billion worth of shares, as Amazon’s sales are supercharged by the pandemic.
The ecommerce business’s 56-year-old boss sold 1m shares in his company in a series of transactions on Monday and Tuesday, newly released filings show.
It was part of an arranged trading plan and follows his sale of another £3.1billion worth of shares earlier this year.
Cashing in: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos sold 1m shares in his company worth £2.4bn in a series of transactions on Monday and Tuesday
After the latest trades, Bezos’s remaining holding stood at 54.5m shares worth £133billion at yesterday’s prices.
He is the world’s richest person with a total fortune of £144billion, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
This year he has seen his wealth swell in size by £75billion as Amazon’s share price has been buoyed by a sales boom during the coronavirus crisis.
With shoppers forced to remain indoors under lockdown, they have turned to online retailers – helping Amazon to post profits of £4billion in the second quarter alone.
Bezos has built it into a £1.2 trillion business since he started it from his garage in Seattle 26 years ago.