Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos cashed out just over $671 million of stock this week by liquidating over 1 million of his own shares in the company. He’s got a lot more where that came from.
The sale was pre-planned and took place over a three-day period to keep from driving Amazon stock prices down. This was “the largest amount ever sold by Bezos,” according to a GeekWire report, though he did sell about the same number of stocks in August of last year.
The difference was the Amazon stock price. It jumped 12 percent in the last month, netting Bezos a reported $6 billion in potential gains in a single day. His stock sale for the week came to little more than 10 percent of that, leaving him with cash and assets that Forbes estimates to be $59 billion.
One of those assets is the Washington Post, which Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013 and has sunk an unspecified but not insignificant amount of money into, hiring more writers and boosting traffic dramatically. Bezos’ latest payday may boost it further.
