Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos overtakes Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world

Bill Gate is no longer the richest man on the planet as the world now has a new richest person Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos with a fortune of over $90 billion, $500 million ahead of Gates.

According to Forbes and Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, who is worth more than $90.6 billion become world richest person after his company stocks rose 1.6% on Thursday.

Forbes had reported on Wednesday night that Bezos was less than $1bn away from being the richest person in the world. This week alone, Bezos’ net-worth has increased by $2.5bn

As at when the markets closed on Wednesday July 26, the Amazon CEO had a net worth of over $89 billion, while Bill Gates had a net worth of just over $90 billion. But Amazon's share price jumped by more than $15 a share overnight when markets opened on Thursday, and was recently trading near that level, while Microsoft went down slightly giving Bezos a net worth of $90.6 billion, putting him $500 million ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. 

With the stock holding up on Thursday, Bezos — who owns around 80 million shares of Amazon — added more than $1.4 million to his fortune which put him past Gates.

Gates, was last surpassed on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days nearly a year ago by Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega.

Bezos quit his job at a hedge fund to start his online bookseller in a garage in Seattle in 1994. He first featured on the 400 richest Americans list in 1998, a year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune.

Gates’ first inclusion in the billionaire’s list was in 1982, and has been no. 1 for 18 of the past 23 years.

Bezos would be nowhere close to being the world’s wealthiest person had Gates not given so much of his fortune to philanthropy. Gates created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes, and had given away $31.1 billion over the course of his lifetime through end of 2016.