Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has blown past Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to become the world’s fourth-richest person after the online giant’s stock soared on surprisingly strong quarterly results.
Bezos’ fortune — which consists mostly of his 18-percent stake in the Seattle-based Web retailer — added more than $6 billion, or 12.5 percent, in after-hours trades Thursday, bringing his total to nearly $60 billion.
That vaults Bezos past Slim — who for years had been the richest man in the world — and solidifies Bezos’s place as America’s third-richest person, trailing just Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, worth $85.1 billion and $68.6 billion, respectively.
Meanwhile, the 52-year-old Amazon chief is now well ahead of the Koch Brothers, each worth $53.2 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Amazon’s stock has nearly doubled in value during the past two years, as the company has dazzled Wall Street with surprisingly strong and robust sales and profits.
The after-hours surge left Amazon shares at $680 — giving the company a market capitalization of $320 billion.
First-quarter profits surged to a record $513 million on revenue of $29.1 billion. At Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing unit, revenue was up 64 percent.
AWS — which powers Web sites and mobile apps like Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify and Instagram — accounts for less than a tenth of Amazon’s revenue, but it is racking up more than half its profits.
In the lower-margin retail business, “Amazon devices are the top-selling products on Amazon,” Bezos said, noting that sales of Fire tablets doubled year-over-year.
But it’s Amazon gadgets powered by its virtual assistant Alexa — mostly the Echo speaker released last fall — that have been a sleeper hit, accounting for 41 percent of devices sold at Amazon, according to Slice Intelligence. That’s seven percentage points ahead of Kindle devices, the firm noted.
