Jeff Bezos is now worth more than $200 billion, making him the richest person in the world by nearly $90 billion

Jeff Bezos.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth more than $200 billion, according to Forbes along with Bloomberg.That leaves him worth nearly $90 billion over the second-richest person on the planet: Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, with a chance of roughly $116 billion, according to Bloomberg.Bezos has more wealth than anyone else’s ever had, even if adjusted for inflation, Forbes reported. At the height of this dot-com boom, Gates was worth an estimated $158 billion in today’s dollars, according to Forbes.  The landmark comes as Amazon continues to thrive through the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to a surge in online sales. Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire CEO of Amazon and wealthiest person on the planet, now has a fortune that exceeds $200 billion, Forbes and Bloomberg reported. Forbes estimated that Bezos was worth $204.6 billion if the markets closed Wednesday, whilst Bloomberg pegged his riches at $202 billion.

It’s a status that has not been reached before, even if adjusted for inflation.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, the second-richest person on the planet having a net value of $116.1 billion, now trails Bezos by a distant $88.5 billion. Gates’ $100 billion fortune at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999 would still be worth $158 billion in today’s dollars — just three-quarters of what Bezos currently worth — Forbes reported.

Bezos’ fortune is also the equivalent of 1% of US gross domestic solution, that sat at $21.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2020 but dropped to $19.4 trillion last quarter, according to the Department of Commerce.

Amazon has experienced a surge in online sales during the COVID-19 pandemic as people turn to online shopping while inside their homes, delivering the organization’s market capitalization through the roof. It’s now valued at $1.7 trillion.

Last year, Amazon blew past Wall Street’s expectations, reporting $5.2 billion in net profit, even after warning investors it would shell out all of the $4 trillion it’d expected to make to its quarter COVID-related initiatives.

Consequently, Bezos has witnessed his net worth almost double during the pandemic: jumping by $97 billion from pandemic lows in early March, according to Bloomberg.

Most of Bezos’ wealth comes from his stock in Amazon, in which he has an 11% stake, according to 2020 SEC filings cited by Bloomberg. He also owns The Washington Post and the space exploration company Blue Origin, which competes with the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Bezos, Musk, Gates, and a handful of America’s ultra-wealthy have seen extraordinary gains during the pandemic, even with roughly 10% of Americans still out of work.

A report last week from the Institute for Policy Studies found that Bezos has been the biggest beneficiary of the pandemic in terms of total net worth increase since mid-March, while Musk saw the highest percentage gains with a 228% boost, taking his personal fortune from $24.6 billion pre-pandemic to $73.1 billion as of Aug. 13.

The report, which analyzed how the dozen richest Americans’ selections have increased in the last couple of months, included statistics as of Aug. 13, which means that it hadn’t even accounted for more recent earnings. Musk’s riches, by way of example, climbed an additional $8 billion in one day alone shortly after IPS published its report as Tesla’s stock jumped into an all-time large , also surpassed $100 billion on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.

In contrast, US household wealth during the initial quarter plummeted by 5.6%, the largest drop since the 1950s, and more than half of US households have dropped income this past year.

Wealth and income inequality in the US had hit record highs prior to the pandemic. But in a indication that economic fallout from the coronavirus has concentrated wealth at the top, data from the US Federal Reserve proves that the top 1% of Americans actually saw their share of overall wealth in the US decrease from 29.3percent to 27.8% during the first quarter of 2020, even as those at the exact top saw enormous gains.

In particular, those profits have gone into executives, economists, and early investors of the greatest US tech companies, that soared past Wall Street expectations past quarter. Of those 12 wealthiest Americans included in IPS’s analysis, eight hailed by the tech industry.

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