Jeff Bezos sold $4bn in Amazon stock over the past week

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Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has sold another $2bn worth of the company’s stock, bringing the total value of shares he has offloaded in the past week to $4bn, according to regulatory filings.

An Amazon filing on Tuesday showed that Bezos, who stepped down as the Seattle-based company’s chief executive in 2021 but remains executive chair, sold 12mn shares for about $2bn between Friday and Monday. 

That follows earlier sales of about 12mn shares, also totalling roughly $2bn, last week, filings show. 

Amazon said in February that Bezos — who is among the world’s richest people with a net worth of $190bn, according to Forbes — planned to sell up to 50mn Amazon shares via broker Morgan Stanley by the end of January 2025.

Bezos remains Amazon’s largest shareholder, with a stake of about 9 per cent even after the recent sales, data from S&P Capital IQ indicates.

Shares in Amazon, which were largely unchanged in after-market trading on Tuesday, have soared by more than 50 per cent over the past 12 months. The rally has sent Amazon’s share price up to close to its all-time high, and pushed the company’s market capitalisation to $1.75tn.

Amazon declined to comment.

The billionaire, who founded Amazon in 1994, has taken a step back from running the sprawling company to pursue other ventures, including his space group Blue Origin.

“Blue Origin needs to be much faster. And it’s one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago,” he told researcher and podcast host Lex Fridman in December.

Blue Origin has trailed behind billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2022, a Blue Origin rocket that was not carrying passengers failed shortly after its launch, after which the company suspended launches.

Last year, Blue Origin announced that Amazon’s outgoing head of devices Dave Limp would take over as chief executive, and the company completed a successful space mission in December.

Bezos — who owns The Washington Post newspaper and runs the Bezos Earth Fund philanthropic group — has also recently drawn attention for reportedly relocating from Seattle to Miami, and for a luxurious lifestyle of yachts and private jets that contrasts with the more frugal profile he maintained while overseeing Amazon’s rapid expansion.