Only ’90s kids will remember this, but once upon a time, it was impossible to imagine anyone other than Bill Gates as the richest person in the world. Now, he’s been vanquished by the world’s most improbably muscular man: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Bezos overtook Gates this afternoon after Amazon stock jumped 13.5 percent following an encouraging quarterly earnings report. (Bezos briefly took the top spot over the summer, only to watch his lead vanish the next day. This one seems a bit more sustainable, and also, who cares.)
The surge in Amazon stock price puts Bezos’s net worth north of $90 billion, an overnight surge of $7 billion over yesterday. To put that number in perspective, Bezos could use that fortune to buy 360 million Amazon Key kits at a price of $250 each. He could buy entry into every American household and still have a fair chunk of change left over.
Don’t feel too bad for Gates, however — he also made about half a billion dollars yesterday thanks to his Microsoft stock, leaving him with a stockpile of $88.5 billion. And while Bezos might have jumped over Bill Gates to take the top slot, we’ll always have this video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair, which I try to reference every time I write about him. Beat that, Bezos.
