If you won thirteen bucks with a lottery ticket, you might feel rather happy with yourself as you carefully pondered how to spend your winnings.
Whether Jeff Bezos is feeling a similar kind of joy having added not $13 but $13 billion to his wealth on Monday alone, well, that’s anyone’s guess.
The Amazon boss’s fortune ballooned after the company’s shares increased by 7.9% due to rising optimism regarding online shopping trends, Bloomberg reported.
The figure of $13 billion marks the largest single-day increase for an individual since Bloomberg launched its Billionaires Index in 2012.
While the U.S. faces the prospect of its worst economic downturn in nearly 100 years due to the coronavirus pandemic, 56-year-old Bezos has seen his net worth increase by $74 billion since the start of this year, taking the fortune of the world’s richest person to a staggering $189.3 billion. Not bad for a guy who started his business in a small Washington garage in 1994.
Online shopping saw a dramatic increase in March when lockdown orders prompted by the pandemic resulted in many people changing their shopping habits. Amazon was one of the primary beneficiaries and hired more workers to cope with the surge in orders. But the company faced criticism after being accused of failing to adequately protect its workers from the potentially deadly virus, though it’s since claimed to have put robust safety measures in place.
Billionaires’ riches
A report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality released in May 2020 revealed that the collective net worth of America’s billionaires increased by $434 billion during the U.S. lockdown across a two-month period from mid-March.
The report said that Bezos and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg saw the largest gains, with the Amazon CEO adding $34.6 billion to his personal fortune, and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion over the two months.
So, what are they spending their money on? Well, Jeff Bezos, for example, recently grabbed some loose change — $165 million of it to be precise — and spent it on nine acres of property in Beverly Hills in what was a record-breaking deal for a residential purchase in California.
