Jeff Bezos Just Sold $1.1 Billion in Amazon Stock (cnn.com) 69
An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money:
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the newly minted richest person in the world, just sold more than $1 billion worth of his stock. The sale was made public in a filing posted Friday. In total, Bezos let go of one million shares for $1,097,803,365. Exactly how Bezos plans to spend those Benjamins wasn't clear. But it isn't unprecedented for him to sell such a large chunk. In May, he sold more than a million shares. A similar sale was executed in August 2016.
Even after his most recent sell off, Bezos still personally owns about a 16% of Amazon, which he founded in 1994. Bezos's large ownership stake helped vault him past Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index... One possible destination for the cash Bezos just freed up is his commercial space company, Blue Origin. Earlier this year, Bezos told reporters at a space symposium that he sells about $1 billion per year worth of Amazon stock to fund the company, according to Reuters... Last month, Blue Origin Chief Executive Officer Bob Smith said he expects the first manned flight to take place by April 2019.
One Silicon Valley newspaper calls it the biggest stock sale ever.
Even after his most recent sell off, Bezos still personally owns about a 16% of Amazon, which he founded in 1994. Bezos's large ownership stake helped vault him past Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index... One possible destination for the cash Bezos just freed up is his commercial space company, Blue Origin. Earlier this year, Bezos told reporters at a space symposium that he sells about $1 billion per year worth of Amazon stock to fund the company, according to Reuters... Last month, Blue Origin Chief Executive Officer Bob Smith said he expects the first manned flight to take place by April 2019.
One Silicon Valley newspaper calls it the biggest stock sale ever.
Funding Blue Origin (Score:5, Informative)
Billionaires don't know how to spend all the money (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost every Amazon web page has poor design. Book listings don't tell when the book was published, so you don't know the edition. Amazon web pages distract you by trying to sell you something else rather than the product you are considering. There are many other examples. Often an attractive low price is listed, but the shipping cost is huge.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Would you fly into space with a company owned by a CEO of a company that can't make a sensible web page?
You're right. Amazon is a total failure. They don't stand a CHANCE up against traditional book stores and other brick-and-mortar retailers. And SHIPPING things to people? Nobody trusts that. They can't possibly provide a way for people to know when things will ship, or get them there quickly - total incompetence. And next thing you know, they're probably going to make some laughable attempt to start selling some pie-in-the-sky "cloud" services while will obviously be a total failure. The fact that their st
Re: (Score:1)
No, it's a sure sign of the bubble they are in.
No, a bubble produces irrationally high stock prices in companies that don't actually deliver any value. Amazon is now conducting roughly half of all online retail, and many other things besides. Unless you're suggesting that e-commerce is just a fad, like tulips, then you're completely missing why their stock has so steadily grown for decades.
Try to see the logic. (Score:2)
Amazon competes with bookstores. Bookstores have traditionally been badly managed. Yes, in many cases Amazon is better than physical bookstores.
Going into the edge of space requires EXTREMELY careful management. I have never seen an indication that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is good at handling huge numbers of details. The sloppiness and self-defeat I see in the design of Ama
Re: (Score:1)
I should listen to you, and only trust NASA to design and operate space-related things. They only blow up and kill people sometimes.
Re: (Score:1)
"Exactly how Bezos plans to spend those Benjamins wasn't clear."
I'll say. $1.1 billion is about $15 million a year for 75 years... He will need help!
Re: (Score:2)
My favorites are how you still can't sort prime-only items by price correctly (it includes the lowest priced non-prime seller), and how Amazon literally still builds their rich pages using their normal grid layout, and in the most impossible to navigate way possible.
Amazon Gift cards (Score:2)
No he took it all out in Amazon Gift cards. Who needs bit coin as an alt-currency when you can print your own if you are jeff bezos.
Hoping he doesn't buy another newspaper (Score:1, Insightful)
Washington Post has gone down the toilet since he bought it.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think so. I've read them before Bezo and after Bezo and I cannot tell the difference.
Re: Hoping he doesn't buy another newspaper (Score:2)
Have you read WaPo lately? First, they went all clickbaity. Then they started providing saucy stuffs for the angry anti-Trump mob. For a while, for some reason at around the same time they showed up as the top news on every topic on Google news. But then, that also made them attract a lot of comments from people who are fed up with their over-the-board anti-Trump rhetorics.
Now, they made the comments section exclusive to only subscribers.
You can verify all these yourself.
There is something fishy with WaPo.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Hoping he doesn't buy another newspaper (Score:2)
Is this reply called for? Nobody likes Trump but a _newspaper_ cannot just write shit any how they want. That's my point. JOURNALISM 101.
You punks have no discipline.
still a role for newspapers (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the newspapers actually have reporters and editors, while the stuff that shows up on the internet is neither researched nor edited; it combines garbage and half-garbage and random factoids in a mish-mash of opinion.
I also read news on the internet, but pretty much all the news that actually has substance originated from a newspaper.
Re: (Score:2)
There should be no difference between the printed Washington Post and the online Washington Post.
Re: (Score:3)
FWIW, the editors and reporters were always biased, back as far as we have records. But they used to be separately biased for each paper, and they used to worry about their reputation. Now the papers are owned by conglomerates who are mainly interested in the papers as pushing their particular message, whatever that it. And telecommunications allows micromanaging by owners at a distance.
Even the purely local papers around here have been bought up by chains, and local news has dropped off precipitously.
Th
Re: (Score:2)
And herein lies the current problem with the internet as a news platform. research takes time and money, whereas page views and the ad money that comes with them follow whoever's the fastest. Newspapers come out once a day so they're bound by the format to have more time to do research on
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit. The newspapers pretty much get their information from the internet, and their stock holders in places like Russia and Mexico.
You are incorrect. Sorry.
News reporter are a beleaguered profession, but they still exist.
Re: (Score:3)
Washington Post has gone down the toilet since he bought it.
Washington has gone down the toilet since he bought it.
Fixed that for you . . .
"Jeff Bezos's Just Sold..." (Score:2)
There is absolutely no need to rape the English language like this. A simple "Jeff Bezos Just Sold..." would have been correct. If you want to use the past participle to underline the immediacy of what happened, just write out "has" in full, as in "Jeff Bezos's Has Just Sold...". The "Bezos's" contraction is technically not incorrect - it's just stylistically obtuse.
I am not a native speaker, but even to my "ears" this headline sounded atrocious.
Re: (Score:1)
It wasn't rape, it was more like harassment.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't rape, it was more like harassment.
Micro-aggression's
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't rape, it was more like harassment.
Micro-aggression's
You had to go there, haven't you.
Unneeded apostrophes suck. (Score:2)
Suborbital (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that's a brief suborbital vomit comet flight that simply goes upward, nowhere near the speeds required to orbit. It's hard to imagine it'll attract much business long term after people realize they can see the blackness of space for longer in a balloon and feel weightlessness just as long on a regular vomit comet plane. Their orbital rocket won't even be ready for unmanned testing by then. It remains to be seen if the billion dollars a year is building a true competitive space company or simply being burned on a billionaire's vanity project.
Re: (Score:2)
Using a roughly standard seven inches per step, how many steps to reach space?
Okay, and who bought it? (Score:2)
In other news (Score:2)
Jeff Bezos just bought 145K Bitcoins.
It's a lie (Score:1)
This story is a lie. Esteemed socialists have assured me that under capitalism rich people don't reinvest their money, they put it huge vaults and swim through it like Scrooge McDuck.
Re: (Score:3)
A sample of a dozen rich people doing things like this doesn't mean all rich people do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can you name one socialist who said such stupid thing? I guess you do not even know what socialism is or what a socialist is. Anyway, people will invest in something (a) if they have the money and (b) think it is worth it. For the second part the "worth it" can be (a) for profit or (b) for pleasure, e.g., their hobby, or (c) their ego. As Bezos is mentally competing with Musk, he must have also a rocket. So he can be rocket man. Wait until he also invests in Hyperloop 2. He cannot invest in Hyperloop 1, as
These sales may be illegal if used to fund Blue O. (Score:1)
Jeff Bezos may be committing a crime if he is actually using this money to fund a new company which he believes may be profitable in the future. A CEO of a company is required by law to act in the best interest of the shareholders and to put the interests of the shareholders above his own.
If Bezos believes a startup is going to be valuable one day, and sells massive chunks of his own stock (which is depressive to shareholder value) to fund the company personally, then he is putting his own individual intere
Interesting, but he could do something better (Score:2)
Investing this money in the ability to commercially send rich people to orbit is nice, but will (a) not help them escape a ruined earth and (b) will only be funny for a short time. However, he could invest $1bn in preventing climate change and becoming therefore a hero in the history books.
meh. (Score:2)