With today’s Amazon AMZN, +1.36% stock rally ahead of the kickoff of Amazon Prime Day, Jeff Bezos has officially become the richest person in modern history, in inflation-adjusted terms.
The Amazon founder and CEO had already been the richest person in the world in today’s dollars, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, ahead of the No. 2 richest person in the world, Bill Gates.
Gates, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.47% , at his richest peak was briefly worth $100 billion in 1999. That’s about $149 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Bloomberg.
On Monday, Bezos’s net worth topped $150 billion. The rest of the list trails behind him by a staggering $50 billion: Gates sits second at $95 billion, and Warren Buffett comes in at No. 3, with a fortune of $82.6 billion.
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Amazon shares are up more than 1% in Monday trading, on track for an eighth-straight gain, and fourth-straight record close. Monday also marks the first day of Prime Day, the e-commerce giant’s annual shopping event that this year will last 36 hours, and include a bricks-and-mortar component with sales at its Whole Foods stores.
Coresight estimates that Prime Day sales will reach $3.4 billion globally, 40% higher than last year’s sales estimates. Amazon does not disclose sales figures for the event.
he Bezos empire extends far beyond just Amazon and Whole Foods. Beyond the $13.7 billion deal for Whole Foods, Amazon has made acquisitions such as online shoe retailer Zappos and video streaming site Twitch.
Then there’s Bezos Expeditions, which manages Jeff Bezos’ venture capital investments. Those investments have included Twitter TWTR, -0.18% Workday, Business Insider and Stack Overflow. Bezos was an angel investor in Google GOOG, -0.20% , having invested $1 million in the company in 1998, and his private company, Nash Holdings, bought The Washington Post in August 2013 for $250 million.
