By Annisa Essack

27:08:2020

Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, have come a long way since the early days of the company. What started as a bookseller in July 1995 has quickly become a behemoth and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Jeff Bezos today holds the historic title of “the first person ever to be worth $200 billion.”

As global closures of brick-and-mortar businesses due to the pandemic, online-retail giant Amazon’s grip on consumer spending habits only shored up. Yesterday’s updated Bloomberg Billionaires Index confirmed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s net worth now totals $202 billion. It has increased by more than $5 billion from the previous accounting period and nearly $90 billion since this time last year.

On Tuesday, the shares of Amazon, which Bezos founded in 1994 and leads as chief executive, rose 1.2%—pushing Bezos’ net worth up by $2.2 billion, to a record $199.7 billion. The record comes just a week after Bezos, who has an 11.1% stake in the $1.68 trillion company—reached a net worth of $197.8 billion, the highest fortune Forbes had recorded since it began tracking billionaires in 1982.

Since the pandemic shook the economy in February, there has been an increase in the appetite for online shopping, allowing Amazon stock to rise by more than 55%. Bezos’ fortune has risen nearly $86 billion in just under 12 months. He was worth $114 billion on the 2019 Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, which used stock prices from early September 2019.

In July 2019, Bezos ended his 25-year marriage and transferred a quarter of his Amazon shares to his now ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who currently owns an estimated 3.8% of the company. Had he not gone through the costliest divorce in history, he may have surpassed the $200 billion mark a long time ago.

And if your curiosity is getting the better of you, the individual at the bottom of the Bloomberg’s 500-person list is India’s industrialist Vikram Lal who nudged out by New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, who also happens to be President Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.