Jeff Bezos is now the second richest person in the world

On By Littum

Upper line

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos overtook Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison as the second-richest person in the world on Forbes’ real-time billionaire ranking, behind Elon Musk, after Amazon shares rose on Friday.

Key facts

Shares of e-commerce giant Amazon rose more than 6% on Friday after the company announced third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations.

Bezos’ fortune, which is mostly tied up in Amazon shares, rose as much as $12.2 billion after the market opened from $204.3 billion the previous day, the biggest daily jump in net worth of any billionaire on Friday.

Ellison, who himself had a gain of about $3.4 billion on Friday, trails Bezos with an estimated net worth of $208.2 billion.

Ellison, who owns about 40% of Oracle, surpassed Bezos as the second-richest person in September after Oracle shares rallied that month after the company’s first-quarter earnings report beat analysts’ expectations with an upbeat outlook.

Key background

Amazon reported its quarterly earnings Thursday after the market closed, reporting $1.43 earnings per share. stock and $158.9 billion in revenue. Shares soared as its international sales segment, along with the company’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services, reported record operating margins. Investors and analysts had braced for a potential disappointment ahead of the earnings release amid concerns about the company’s operating income and incremental costs around Project Kuiper, its satellite project into which the company has poured billions. That “simply didn’t happen,” the Williams Blair analysts wrote Dylan Carden and Arjun Bhatia in a post-earnings note. Bezos, who stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in 2021, owns nearly 10% of the company. He also owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops rockets and briefly flew into space in July 2021. His ex-wife MacKenzie Scott (worth $37.1 billion) received a 4% stake in Amazon as part of their divorce in 2019—her estimated net worth increased by about $2.3 billion on Friday.

Key

After a busy earnings week for major tech companies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth fell below $200 billion on Thursday — making Musk, Bezos and Ellison the only billionaires above that mark — despite the social media giant reporting big earnings after market closing Wednesday. Investors’ worries about spending continued as Reality Labs, the hardware unit responsible for products like the Meta Quest VR headset, posted a $4.4 billion loss and the company raised its capital spending to between $38 billion and $40 billion. “Our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue to invest significantly there as well,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday on a call with analysts.

Further reading

Amazon earnings: Shares rise as e-commerce giant beats expectations (Forbes)