Jeff Bezos: The richest man in the world is now rolling in an extra $20 billion

Alex Lee February 2, 2018

Ring the clanger! It’s February, and that means it’s earnings season for the tech tycoons of Silicon Valley. Apple, for example, is already trumpeting its more profitable quarter ever, but now it’s time for Jeff Bezos to gloat. The Amazon CEO is now $20 billion richer.

Jeff Bezos: The richest man in the world is now rolling in an extra $20 billion

Amazon’s astronomical growth has been fuelled by a number of things, which includes the huge amount of Amazon Echo devices sold in the run-up to Christmas, combined with regular Christmas shopping. More Prime subscribers, its cloud services business and the opening of its checkout-free supermarket Amazon Go also gave the company a healthy bounce in its shares. All of this meant that Amazon ended its year with an almighty bang, with a 38% increase in sales in the last three months of 2017.

The company reported a fourth quarterly revenue of a massive $60.5 billion, that’s nearly a whole billion more than analysts had predicted, bringing its stocks up over 6.5%.

While there’s cause for celebration at Bezos’ house(s), it’s a bit gloomier down in Google’s camp. Alphabet has made a loss, meaning they both lost $3 billion – mainly due to a $9.9 billion charge after the change in Trump’s US tax law.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, landed himself an extra $2 billion, despite revealing that time on the social network had declined by 50 million hours a day in the fourth quarter. That sounds like a huge decrease, but between Facebook’s enormous readership it only translates to around two minutes per user.

Bezos’ fortune increase comes as, only last month, he solidified his stake as the richest person in the world, leapfrogging past previous title-holder, Bill Gates.

Image: James N. Mattis, used under Creative Commons