The Amazon CEO continues to be the world’s chief beneficiary of quarantine consumer culture.
August
27, 2020
2 min read
Worldwide closures of brick-and-mortar retail have only shored up online-retail giant Amazon’s grip on consumer spending habits. Need proof? Yesterday’s updated Bloomberg Billionaires Index (yes, that’s a thing) confirmed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo’s net worth now totals $202 billion, up by more than $5 billion from the previous accounting and nearly $90 billion since this time last year. CNN attributes the bump to Amazon’s soaring stock valuation, which is up by an astounding 86 percent so far in 2020. If the notion of one man — in one asset-based form or another — possessing that much sovereign wealth makes you uneasy, at least the guy is pledging some of it to climate change. And you can always still do the bulk of your online ordering directly through merchants, particularly now that most businesses have ramped up their ecommerce efforts. Related: Jeff Bezos Is Now Personally Worth More Than Nike, McDonald’s, Costco and Almost 50 Percent of the DowAnd in case you were curious, the individual at the bottom of Bloomberg’s 500-person list as of this writing? India industrialist Vikram Lal, just barely edged out by New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, who also happens to be President Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
