Bill Gates has just been overtaken the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world.
Jeff just topped the Microsoft founder, Gates for the first time ever with the fortune of $90 billion.
According to Forbes, the opening of markets today, July 27 got Bezos to a net worth of $90.6 billion, putting him more than $500 million ahead of Bill Gates. Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.3 billion to Bezos’ net worth. That was enough to put him ahead of Gates, who was last surpassed on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days nearly a year ago by Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega.
Forbes started tracking billionaires around the globe in 1987. Bezos is now the seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the third American to top the global ranks besides Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
While Gates and Buffett both appeared on Forbes’ first ranking of America’s 400 Richest people in 1982, Bezos is a newer addition to Forbes’ wealth rankings. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 in 1998, a year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune. Bezos ranked third richest in the world on Forbes 2017 list of the World’s Billionaires, published in March, with a fortune of $72.8 billion.
Gates gave so much of his fortune to philanthropy making it possible for Jeff to overtake him. Gates created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes. He gave away $32.9 billion over the course of his lifetime through end of 2016.
Bezos attended Princeton and then worked at a hedge fund before starting his online bookseller in a garage in Seattle in 1994. Amazon has since grown into an online retail behemoth selling a wide range of products. It also offers cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division, known as AWS. Outside of his day job, Jeff Bezos owns aerospace company Blue Origin and the Washington Post.
