Jeff Bezos Sells Over $3 Billion in Amazon Shares

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man and most of his wealth is tied up in his shares of the stock.

This week he sold over $3.1 billion worth of shares according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission compiled by OpenInsider.

The sale brought his total cash out in 2020 to slightly more than $7.2 billion.

Bezos’ sales were part of a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan, according to the filings. Earlier this year, Bezos sold more than $4.1 billion worth of shares in the company.

The chief executive owns more than 54 million shares of Amazon that are worth more than $170 billion.
Bezos recently testified before the House Antitrust Subcommittee alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet.

It was last week that the e-commerce giant reported its second-quarter results and beat analyst expectations. The company reported second-quarter profit of $5.2 billion, or $10.30 a share, nearly doubling from $5.22 a share a year ago. Sales wer $88.9 billion, up 40% from $63.4 billion a year prior and well ahead of Amazon’s prediction of $75 billion to $81 billion. Analysts on average had predicted earnings of $1.48 a share on sales of $81.45 billion.

“This was another highly unusual quarter, and I couldn’t be more proud of and grateful to our employees around the globe,” Bezos said. “As expected, we spent over $4 billion on incremental COVID-19-related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers in this time of high demand — purchasing personal protective equipment, increasing cleaning of our facilities, following new safety process paths, adding new backup family-care benefits, and paying a special thank-you bonus of over $500 million to front-line employees and delivery partners.”

“If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,” the CEO said back in May.

Shares of Amazon are up over 70% for the year so far.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.