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Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.
Jeff Bezos has gone on a bit of a selling spree.
The chairman and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.61% has sold 968,148 shares worth $1.84 billion over the past three days, according to disclosures made in Securities and Exchange Commission filings late Wednesday night.
According to Forbes, this may be his largest-ever stock sale in dollar terms. Bezos, the founder of space exploration company Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post, sold the stock in conjunction with a pre-arranged 10b5-1 trading plan, the SEC filing said.
Bezos remains by far the e-commerce and cloud giant’s largest shareholder, as he still owns 58.1 million Amazon shares, SEC filings show, which at current stock prices would be valued at about $107.9 billion. That would still make Bezos the world’s richest human, as the Bloomberg Billionaires Index had Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.31% co-founder Bill Gates worth $107 billion through Wednesday.
Earlier this year, Bezos’s divorce settlement had MacKenzie Bezos receiving 25% of their jointly held Amazon stock, or 4% of the shares outstanding. At the time, that made MacKenzie the fourth wealthiest woman in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Amazon’s stock fell 0.6% to $1,855.32 on Thursday, reversing earlier intraday gains of as much as 1.7%. The stock has dropped 7.3% amid a six-session losing streak, in the aftermath of disappointing second-quarter results. The timing of Bezos’s share sales have worked out so far, as the current price is well below the weighted-average price that the shares were sold:
Date Number of shares sold Weighted average stock price of share sales Value of shares sold July 29 322,716 $1,904.99 $614.77 million July 30 322,716 $1,901.31 $613.58 million July 31 322,716 $1890.96 $610.24 million Total 968,148 $1,899.09 $1.84 billion U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, MarketWatch
Amazon shares have climbed 23.5% year to date, making the company the third-most valuable company by market capitalization at $917.7 billion, behind first-place Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.31% at $1.06 trillion and Apple Inc. AAPL, -2.16% at $941.9 billion.
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.79% has climbed 22.2% this year and the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.90% has gained 17.8%.
