According to this article, the past two days’ gains boosted Amazon.com’s market capitalization — the value of all the shares trading in the public domain — from $18.3 billion to $25.7 billion, a gain of about $7.4 billion.
But more importantly, for Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon.com in 1994, that meant the value of his 101.3 million shares in the company jumped in value from $4.53 billion to $6.36 billion, a gain of roughly $1.8 billion.
Translation: Bezos owns 25%. I thought by now he would be down to 10-15%, but I guess it helps that he used debt financing early on.
Amazon’s stock price is deserving of a book story of its own. The stock peaked on Dec. 10, 1999 at $106.69. Then, the stock lost 94% of its value over roughly the next 22 months before bottoming at $5.97 on Sept. 28, 2001. Since then, the stock is up 951%. His net worth has been all over the place from $10.1 billion in 1999, according to Forbes, to $1.5 billion in 2002. Last year, Forbes said he was worth $4.3 billion.
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