Bill Gates was the richest person in the world for many years. However, over the last decade, he has lost the position several times to Jeff Bezos, the CEO, and founder of Amazon. On Friday, for the first time in the last two years, Bill Gates reclaimed the first position from Jeff Bezos.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates Takes the First Position From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos
While Gates was already doing well on his own, he must have gotten a boost after Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud-computing contract. Before the announcement, most people believed that the contract would be awarded to Amazon but this didn’t happen. Shortly after the announcement was made, Microsoft shares started to rise moving up by 4%. The surge in shares moved gates net worth $110 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon’s shares fell by 2% and Bezos’s net worth sat at $108 billion. This is according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Last month, after Amazon reported that its profits were down in the last 2 years, Gates overtook Bezos briefly as the richest person in the world. However, before the end of the day, Bezos was back on top. Gates has a 1% stake in Microsoft. Within this year alone, the company has experienced a 48% surge boosting this 1% stake. Apart from this, Gates generates income from Cascade, his family office and other investments.
It is important to note that one of the major reasons why Bezos is struggling to hold the first position is his divorce with MacKenzie. Following the divorce, she received a quarter of their joint holdings in Amazon. This caused Bezos a dip in his net worth.
On the other hand, Gates would never have lost the first position initially if he didn’t donate $35 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation between 1994 and 2019.
