The Number One
Jeff Bezos's vast wealth has reached uncharted territory
By Shawn Langlois
Published: Jan 10, 2018 5:04 a.m. ET
MarketWatch photo illustration/Getty Images, Everett Collection
Jeff Bezos has a stranglehold on the world's richest crown.
ShawnLanglois
Social-media editor
At the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999, Bill Gates rode Microsoft MSFT, +0.04% riches to a net worth in excess of $100 billion, setting a new high-water mark on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index that'd stand for almost two decades.
Then Jeff Bezos came along.
The Amazon AMZN, +0.25% founder's net worth reached $105.1 billion this week. That's uncharted territory, according to Bloomberg. The online retailer has delivered a 57% rally over the past year, including a 7% pop in 2018 alone.
Gates currently stands in a distant second place, trailing Bezos by almost $12 billion. Of course, Gates has given away loads of cash to his charitable foundation. Had he kept it for himself, his fortune would come to more than $150 billion, Bloomberg calculated, or about the equivalent of Berkshire Hathaway's BRK.A, -0.34% Warren Buffett and Facebook's FB, -0.07% Mark Zuckerberg combined.
Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, took the crown as world's richest last summer, briefly passing Gates. He regained it in October, and he's tightened his grip since, benefiting from yet another huge holiday season for Amazon. Late last year, amid an Amazon share rally set off by frenzied Black Friday consumer buying, Bezos became the first person to be worth $100 billion since the dot-com boom.
Related: All the companies in Jeff Bezos's empire, in one (large) chart
Of course, the vast riches of Bezos and Gates likely don't even approach the riches of history's wealthiest figures. The first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar, for example, controlled much of the world's most powerful states — including Egypt — as part of his estimated $4.6 trillion net worth. Egypt made up at least 25% of global GDP at the time.
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Shawn Langlois
Shawn Langlois is an editor and writer for MarketWatch in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @slangwise.
BRK.A
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Microsoft Corp. U.S.: Nasdaq: MSFT
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