Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in modern history.

The Amazon.com founder's net worth broke $150 billion (roughly Rs. 10.2 lakh crores) in New York on Monday morning, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That's about $55 billion (roughly Rs. 3.7 lakh crores) more than Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, the world's second-richest person.

Bezos, 54, has now topped Gates in inflation-adjusted terms. The $100 billion (roughly Rs. 6.8 lakh crores) mark that Gates hit briefly in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom would be worth about $149 billion (roughly Rs. 10.2 lakh crores) in today's dollars. That makes the Amazon chief executive officer richer than anyone else on earth since at least 1982, when Forbes published its inaugural wealth ranking.

Bezos crossed the threshold just as Amazon prepares to kick off its 36-hour summer sales event, Prime Day. The company's share price was $1,825.73 (roughly Rs. 1.24 lakhs) at 11:10am in New York, extending its 2018 gain to 56 percent and giving Bezos a $150.8 billion fortune.

His net worth has soared by $52 billion this year, which is more than the entire fortune of Mukesh Ambani, the newly crowned richest person in Asia. It also puts Bezos's personal fortune within spitting distance of the Walton family's $151.5 billion, which is the world's richest dynasty.

"It's hard to even put it in perspective," said Michael Cole, CEO of Cresset Family Office. "It's such a staggering number."

A Federal Reserve report found the top 1 percent of US families controlled 38.6 percent of wealth in the US in 2016, compared with 22.8 percent held by the bottom 90 percent. Last year, Oxfam International found that more than 80 percent of earnings went to the top 1 percent of the world population.

Behind Bezos on the Bloomberg index is Gates, with a $95.5 billion fortune followed by Warren Buffett with $83 billion.

Gates would have had a net worth of more than $150 billion if he'd held onto assets that he's given away, largely to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He's donated almost 700 million Microsoft shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets since 1996, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving.

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