Jeff Bezos returns to the top among the richest men in the world.
The founder and main shareholder of Amazon regains the crown that he lost at the end of 2021 after surpassing Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The businessman's fortune reaches 200,000 million dollars (184,000 million euros), while that of the head of Tesla and SpaceX stands at 198,000 million dollars (182,000 million euros).
The good evolution of Amazon on the stock market, which has appreciated 89% in the last 12 months and 18% in 2024, and the fall of Tesla (24% so far this year and 3% in 12 months) They have allowed Bezos to return to first place in the rankings.
The podium is very tight, since third place belongs to LVMH's largest shareholder, Bernard Arnault, with 197 billion dollars.
So far this year, Bezos's fortune has increased by $23.4 billion, while Musk's has fallen by $31.3 billion, always according to Bloomberg estimates.
Arnault, for his part, has added 18 billion to his assets in the last two months of the year thanks to the 15% rise in the LVMH stock market.
However, the biggest pull of this start of the year belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and head of Meta, whose wealth has increased by 50.7 billion dollars and has raised him to fourth position, with a total of 179,000 million dollars, thanks to the good evolution of the company.
Bill Gates is fifth, with 150,000 million, 8,800 more so far in 2024. Jensen Huang, co-founder and shareholder of Nvidia, the star value of the Stock Market in the last 12 months, is also rising strongly on the table.
So far this year alone, his fortune has increased by 31 billion, to 75,000.
The best-placed Spaniard is the founder of Inditex, Amancio Ortega, 16th, with 88.9 billion dollars, and the richest Latin American is the telecommunications and finance businessman Carlos Slim, 14th, with 103,000 million.
Bezos has made cash this year by selling 50 million Amazon shares.
The founder of the e-commerce and cloud computing giant pocketed $8.5 billion.
Sales prices ranged from a low of $165.87 per share to a high of $175.34.
The transactions took place on nine consecutive business days starting February 7.
The businessman did not explain the reasons for the sales, which arrived shortly after he moved his home from Seattle (Washington) to Miami (Florida).
In 2022, the State of Washington instituted a 7% tax on capital gains in 2022. Florida, on the other hand, does not have that tax figure, so, since these are shares of the founder in which practically the entire amount of the sale are capital gains, Bezos can save nearly $600 million in taxes by having sold as a Miami resident.
The founder of Amazon has sold more than $30 billion in shares of the company he founded since 2002. Bezos remains the company's largest shareholder, with 9.3% of the capital, followed by Vanguard, which controls 7.46 %, as recently reported, and by BlackRock, which recently declared it owned 6.1% of the capital.
The founder of Amazon announced on November 3 that he was leaving Seattle, the city where he had spent most of his life, as he himself explained through his Instagram account.
He said he was moving to Miami to be closer to his parents and the operations of Blue Origin, his space company.
Bezos last year bought two adjoining mansions on Indian Creek, an artificial island in Miami known as the
billionaire bunker
with 41 residences and a golf club on an area of 1.2 square kilometers.
He paid 68 million dollars for the first and another 79 million for the second.
Elon Musk's wealth, meanwhile, has been reduced by about $100 billion from the maximum of $300 billion it reached in 2021, due to Tesla's poor performance on the stock market since then.
Shares received as part of a record $56 billion compensation program continue to be counted in his wealth.
A Delaware judge annulled that stratospheric bonus in shares, but the sentence is not yet final nor has it been carried out.
Musk and Amazon are rivals in the space business, where SpaceX has a lot of advantage over Blue Origin thanks to its satellite launch business with reusable rockets and its Starlink communications satellite network.
Musk's semi-official biographer, Walter Isaacson, told EL PAÍS in an interview a few months ago about his opinions on his rival: “Musk competes with Bezos, but he thinks it's great that Bezos is making rockets.
I think he's trying to push him to be more competitive.
"He thinks Bezos spends too much time on vacation and that's why he hasn't been able to put a rocket into orbit, but I actually think Musk admires Bezos for trying and wants him to be more successful with his rocket company," he said.
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