Jeff Bezos, Richest Man in History, Worth $150 Billion

• Jeff Bezos, Richest Man in History, Worth $150 Billion

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. founder, is the richest man in modern history.

The billionaire on Monday cracked the $150 billion mark for the first time after been the second man in history to break the $100 billion thresholds, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index that ranked richest people showed.

Bill Gates was the first man to hit $100 billion mark in 1999 during the dot-com boom that gave birth to billionaires like Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos himself and others.

Bezos, 54, is now $55 billion richer than Bill Gates, the world’s second-richest man. That makes Jeff Bezos the richest man alive, at least since 1982 when Forbes started its wealth ranking.

Bezos acquisitions in a picture.

The billionaire crossed the $150 billion mark ahead of Amazon 36-hour summer sales event, Prime Day, which got off to a rocky start as glitches struck the firm’s website and mobile app. However, the shares of the company have rebounded following a report that Prime Day sales exceeded last year’s sales by 90 per cent.

The company shares climbed to a record high of $1,851.69 on Tuesday before paring gain slightly to $1,848.02 a unit share as at the time of writing.

So far, Bezos net worth has risen by more than $52 billion in 2018, bigger than the net worth of Jack Ma, the Chairman of Alibaba Group Holding, Asia’s wealthiest man.