According to the fillings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos sold nearly $2 billion worth of his shares in his company.
SEC Filings revealed that Bezos sold roughly $684 million worth of Amazon shares on Tuesday, after unloading about $1.27 billion worth of stock on Monday. This brought the total shares he sold to about $1.95 billion in the past two days.
Bezos sold around 739,000 shares this week under a pre-arranged trading plan, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. He plans to sell as many as 2 million shares, according to a separate filing.
The sales come one week after Amazon reported first-quarter earnings results, trouncing Wall Street’s expectations as its business continues to be buoyed by the pandemic-fueled surge in e-commerce activity.
Bezos has accelerated his stock sales in recent years, previously unloading nearly $4.1 billion worth of shares last February. Bezos sold more than $3 billion worth of Amazon shares last November.
The Amazon founder previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin, which continues to grow and on Wednesday announced it will launch its first astronaut crew to space this summer.
Bezos also earmarked additional capital for the Day One Fund, the organization he launched in September 2018 to provide education in low-income communities and combat homelessness. Last November, the fund awarded $98.5 million in grants to 32 groups.
These initiatives are expected to become a greater focus for Bezos once he steps down in the third quarter. Bezos will turn the helm over to AWS CEO Andy Jassy and assume the role of executive chairman on Amazon’s board.
Jeff Bezos sold about $2.5 billion of Amazon stock, his first big disposal this year after offloading more than $10 billion worth of shares in 2020.
The world’s richest person continues to hold more than 10 percent of Amazon, the primary source of his $191.3 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.