Online retailer beats Wal-Mart with 80 percent rise in 2015
Not many in this part of the world have heard of Bezos Leaps. Well, the 51-year-old is the founder of Amazon.com Inc. The American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States.
This year, Amazon has so far added almost $5 billion to his fortune as the online retailer rose in after-hours trading and pushed his net worth above $55 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos passes brothers Charles and David Koch, and ranks behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S.
Before last week surge, Bezos’s fortune had jumped 77 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud segment. The $22 billion year-to-date increase is the most of anyone on the index and more than the combined gains of Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazon shares last week, rose 10 percent from the close to $621 at 4:47 p.m. in New York. The increase will make him the fifth-richest person on Earth, up from the No. 20 spot on Jan. 1st.