by Chris White
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is expected to ride the wave of business his company is collecting during the coronavirus pandemic to become the world’s first trillionaire, research shows.
Bezos’s net worth has grown by 34% on average over the past half decade, which could make him a trillionaire, according to an analysis from Comparisun, a platform that helps companies create business management tools. Along with creating marketing tools, the company also conducts studies forecasting what will happen in the business sector, Comparisun’s website noted.
“Jeff Bezos is the first to hit the $100 billion mark and could be the world’s first trillionaire sooner than you’d think,” Comparisun noted in a blog post. “We’ve analysed historical valuations of some of the world’s richest companies and individuals in an attempt to predict when they’ll join the Trillion Dollar Club.”
Comparisun analyzed the past five years of data on the net worth of the wealthiest 25 people in the world, according to Forbes, as well as the market capitalization of the 25 highest-valued companies. The company’s analysts then calculated the average yearly percentage of growth over the past half decade and extrapolated that number to predict how the value will change over time.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is snipping on Bezos’s heels, according to Comparisun’s analysis, which suggests the social media mogul could gain trillionaire status by age 51. But the Amazon CEO’s rise in the ranking will come despite a personal setback: a divorce settlement.
Bezos lost an estimated $38 billion after he paid a massive settlement in 2019 to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos. She took roughly 25% stock in Amazon and left him with full stock in The Washington Post and Blue Origin, a privately funded aerospace manufacturer designed to make technologies allowing private travel to space.
Meanwhile, more and more Americans are leaning on Amazon’s e-commerce technology to help them cope with the economic lockdowns, which officials instituted to slow the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 85,000 people in the United States. The sky-high market evaluation has not come without a significant trade-off.
House Antitrust Subcommittee chairman David Cicilline of Rhode Island is taking aim at Amazon and demanding that Bezos appear in front of his committee and address reports that his company used data from independent sellers to develop competing products.
“It is our hope and expectation that he will come voluntarily,” Cicilline told Politico reporter Cristiano Lima during a May 7 virtual interview posted online.
“But if he elects not to do it voluntarily then we are prepared to use compulsory process to compel his attendance,” the Democrat said of Bezos.
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Chris White is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Jeff Bezos” by Seattle City Council. CC BY 2.0. Background Photo “Amazon Biosphere” by brewbooks. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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