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Why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reign as World’s Richest lasted a few hours

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Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon

Jeff Bezos briefly became the world’s richest person, surpassing Bill Gates with a net worth of just over $90 billion

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ reign on the top of the Forbes’ Real Time Billionaires List only lasted a morning.

Bezos became the richest person in the world for the first time with a $90.6 billion net worth when markets opened on Thursday.

But while Amazon stock climbed another 1.3% to an intraday high of $1,083.31, it then dropped down to $1,046 by the time markets closed, knocking Bezos out of the top spot.

He ended the day with an $88.7 billion fortune, down $540 million from late Wednesday.

Gates is once again the richest person in the world with an estimated $89.8 billion fortune, down $240 million from yesterday.

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Despite the drop, this is likely not Bezos’ last time at the top of Forbes’ real-time ranking.

Because he owns nearly 17% of Amazon stock, small fluctuations in Amazon’s stock have billion-dollar consequences for Bezos’ net worth.

As of the close of markets Thursday, Bezos was only $1.1 billion behind Gates.

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Bezos’ net worth took a further hit in after hours trading Thursday when Amazon reported its second quarter earnings and had a big miss on earnings.

Amazon reported earnings per share of $0.40, lower than the $1.42 per share analysts had estimated.

Amazon stock dropped more than 2% in after hours trading as of 4:45 p.m. Eastern, which further reduced Bezos’ fortune by $1.8 billion.

He is now worth $86.9 billion, which means the gap between Gates and Bezos is now $2.9 billion.

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Bezos joined Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 1998, one year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune.

He started the online retail giant in a garage in Seattle before his 30th birthday.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964.

His family was originally from Villafrechós, a little town in Valladolid, Spain.

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Miguel Bezos worked his way through the University of New Mexico and married Jacklyn, becoming Jeff Jorgensen’s step-father, who had his surname changed to Bezos.

After the wedding the family moved to Houston (Texas) and Miguel worked as an engineer for Exxon.

The young Jeff attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers working on his grandfather’s ranch in southern Texas.

Bezos’ other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers.

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He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000) with test flights to space which started in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018.

In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper.

A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions.

When markets opened on July 27, 2017, Bezos briefly became the world’s richest person, surpassing Bill Gates with a net worth of just over $90 billion.

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He lost the title later in the day when Amazon’s stock dropped, returning him to second place with a net worth just below $90 billion.

The company began as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming and audio streaming.

Amazon.com is currently the world’s largest Internet sales company on the World Wide Web, as well as the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services, through its Amazon Web Services arm.

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