Bezos Falls To 3rd Spot Among World's Richest

How fast the fortunes of the world"s richest shift: just two weeks ago, when AMZN hit its all time high on July 27, its CEO Jeff Bezos briefly surpassed Bill Gates as the world"s richest man for the first time ever, despite growing rumors and rumblings of regulatory pushback against Amazon which is rapidly emerging as the biggest monopoly threat to established legacy industries.

Fast forward two weeks and Bezos is no longer the world"s richest man, he isn"t even the world"s second richest man because after yesterday"s market slump and Nasdaq plunge that drained $42.7 billion from the net worth of the world’s 500 richest people, the drop in Amazon stock...

.... was enough to push Bezos from his spot as the world’s second-richest person according to Bloomberg calculations. The worst market rout since May, lopped $2 billion from Bezos’s fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after AMZN dropped 2.6% to under $957, more than $100 lower than its July 27 all time high of just over $1.080.

As a result, Bezos is now worth "only" $82.2 billion about $600 million behind Spanish retail magnate Amancio Ortega, founder of the Zara clothing chain.

The losses, which came following the escalating jawboning and war of words between President Trump North Korea, spanned multiple regions and industries, but tech billionaires were hit the hardest, accounting for seven of the 10 biggest declines. NetEase Chairman Lei Ding incurred the second-largest loss, dropping $1.8 billion to $16.8 billion, followed by Facebook"s Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth slid $1.6 billion to $71.2 billion, rounding off the list of the Top 5 richest people in the world.

Meanwhile, the top spot once again belongs to Bill Gates, who briefly ceded the No. 1 spot to Bezos on an intraday basis two weeks ago; Gates lost $848.5 million on Thursday which however was not nearly enough to dethrone him from the rank of world"s richest, with a net worth of $90 billion.

Paul Craig Roberts Questions "What Really Explains Amazon.com's Share Price?"

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

PCR Takes a Look at Today’s “Top Stories” on Bloomberg

“Jeff Bezos briefly overtook Bill Gates as the world’s richest person. A surge in Amazon shares Thursday morning in advance of its earnings report gave Bezos a net worth of $92.3 billion, surpassing the Microsoft founder’s $90.8 billion fortune.

In afternoon trading, Bezos remains ranked second on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Gates has held the top spot since May 2013.”

Amazon’s stock closed yesterday at $1,046 per share. Amazon’s profits do not support this extraordinary price. Apple, a very profitable company, has a share price of $150.56, an overprice itself.

What or who is making Bezos so rich from an online sales company? Note, amazon.com is just sales. It is not some new manufacturing technology that produces valuable output at low cost. amazon.com is what Walmart, Sears, and Macy’s do, the difference being that amazon.com is online and Walmart, Sears, and Macy’s are in physical locations where real merchandise can be experienced hands on and tried on for fit.

In other words, online purchases are convenient, but you don’t know what you are getting. Does it fit? What is the quality? And so forth. How many times do you send it back before you get what you want?

There are two answers to the question about who is making Bezos rich.

One is that Wall Street is betting that the collapse of US anti-trust law and regulatory authority - it is still on the books but not enforced, just look at the Big Banks - and the ability of Bezos to use his ownership of the Washington Post, the newspaper of the country’s capital, to support those who support him, ensure that amazon.com will be an online monopoly. Once this is put in place, amazon’s prices and profits will rise, and the extraordinary amazon.com P/E ratio will come into line with reality.

Another is that Bezos’ cooperation with Washington’s spy network over all Americans is paid for by the CIA’s many front companies driving up the price of amazon.com’s stock. As the price of amazon.com rises, so does Bezos’ wealth.

[ZH: perhaps there is another reason related to the latter...]

I don’t know that either of these answers is correct. What I notice is that Bill Gates who heads the largest digital technology company is on occasion second fiddle to Bezos who heads an online Sears or Macy’s.

Apple with a share price of $150 earned $52.9 billion during the second quarter of 2017. Earnings per share were $2.10.

Amazon.com earned $38 billion. Earnings per share were 40 cents.

Why is amazon.com’s price $1,046 per share and Apple’s price is $150.56 per share.

Apple’s earnings per share are 5.25 times higher than amazon’s, but amazon’s stock price is 6.9 times higher than Apple’s. What explains this?

The free market answer is that amazon.com, a company that sells other companies’ products, is more promising than a high tech leading manufacturing company of our time.

Does that make sense to you?

Keep in mind that it was Bezos’ government propaganda sheet, the Washington Post, that gave credibility to the shadowy organization, PropOrNot, an entity better hidden than an offshore money laundering operation, that produced a list of 200 truth-tellers which it libeled as “Russian dupe/agent.”

Monopolies are inconsistent with free market capitalism and with democracy. Monopolies and government bond together to create fascism.

Bezos Bursts Above Buffett To Become World's Second Richest Man

On the heels of the melt-up in US mega-cap tech stocks, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has leapt past Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the world’s second-richest person.

As Bloomberg reports, the 53-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. added $1.5 billion to his net worth on Wednesday, the day after the e-commerce giant announced it will buy Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com, and has added over $7 billion since the global equities rally began following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8.

Bezos has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s $700 million more than Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Buffett and $1.3 billion above Ortega, the founder of Inditex SA and Europe’s richest person. Buffett, who’s added $1.7 billion in 2017, has shed $4.7 billion since his fortune peaked at $79.6 billion on March 1. Ortega is up $2.1 billion year-to-date.

Bezos remains $10.4 billion behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s richest person with $86 billion.

If AMZN topped $1000 - while MSFT flatlined - Bezos would take Gates.