Jeff Bezos’ net worth fell by $15.2 billion on Friday, leading a broad decline in the wealth of the world’s 500 richest people, with $134 billion disappearing from their fortunes.
Shares of Amazon.com Inc. fell 8.8% amid a broad market selloff, reducing Bezos’ net worth to $191.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop is his third-worst one-day decline, following a $36 billion drop in the Amazon co-founder’s wealth on April 4, 2019, following a divorce, and a 14% drop on April 29, 2022.
The Nasdaq 100 index fell 2.4%, hurting the fortunes of other tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison, whose net worths fell by $6.6 billion and $4.4 billion, respectively. Uncertainty about potential Federal Reserve rate cuts, as well as some high-profile earnings disappointments, have helped plunge the tech-heavy index into correction territory, wiping out more than $2 trillion in value in just three weeks.
Investors are also jittery over fears that this year’s AI-fueled gains are overblown or that the market is too concentrated. Amazon’s shares plunged — the biggest drop since April 2022 — after the company said on an earnings call that it planned to continue spending big on AI even at the expense of short-term profits.
Technology billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page also lost more than $3 billion on Friday, as shares of Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet tumbled in New York trading. Overall, the tech giants shaved $68 billion off their wealth, according to Bloomberg’s Wealth Index.
Bezos, 60, the world’s second-richest person, has been selling Amazon shares steadily this year. He sold about $8.5 billion worth of shares over nine trading days in February. And on the day Amazon set a new record last month, he revealed plans to sell an additional 25 million shares worth $5 billion.
Additional sales would boost his net worth to about $13.5 billion this year, according to Bloomberg estimates. He will still own about 912 million shares, or about 8.8% of Amazon, after the sale is completed.
His wealth also derives from space exploration company Blue Origin and The Washington Post.
