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Jeff Bezos Now the Richest Person in the World (Again)
As the clock struck 12 yesterday on Prime Day, the retailing giant’s website experienced periodic outages as millions of shoppers hopped on the site hoping to score some deals. While many shoppers took to social media to complain about the downed website, it went back online about an hour after Prime Day started. As the day closed out, one person was certainly smiling his way to the bank after the resounding success of Prime Day: Jeff Bezos.
Bloomberg Billionaires Index has declared that the Amazon CEO is now the richest individual in modern recorded history when adjusted for inflation. As Amazon shares ballooned, closing at $1,822.49, Bezos’ wealth is now estimated at over an astounding $150 billion. This completely blows the previous record held by Bill Gates, whose wealth at its height was counted at $100 billion before adjusted for inflation.
Like most billionaire entrepreneurs, Bezos’s fortune is based mainly on the stock price of his company, and Amazon shares have been consistently on the up and up in the past year. Just last year in November, news broke that Bezos surpassed the $100 billion mark, but he has since gained half of that in an increasingly shorter amount of time.
However, this steep escalation in wealth hasn’t come without controversy. Amazon has long been criticised for its corporate culture, placing a high importance on productivity over providing a safe work environment and fair wages. This is more so evident in employees that work at the many warehouses around the world that are the backbone of the company by being able to keep up with the astronomical amount of packages needed to be shipped out every day, especially on a day like Prime Day. Amazon warehouse workers in Europe went on strike during the crazy Prime Day crunch, in protest of better working conditions and wages.
Despite this, Prime Day is still a hit with Amazon customers. Practically every single Amazon tech product was steeply discounted, along with big-ticket items like 4K smart TV’s, smartphones, Bose headphones, and laptops.
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