Amazon.com Inc chief executive officer Jeff Bezos briefly became the world’s richest man on Thursday in Forbes magazine’s tracking of wealth, as stock in his e-commerce company hit an all-time high.
Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates reclaimed the lead by the afternoon, as Amazon’s stock fell nearly 1 percent for the day to US$1,046.
Amazon shares have been trading at a record high. They hit US$1,083.31 at about noon on Thursday.
Photo: AP
According to securities filings, Bezos owns about 80 million shares, or 17 percent; those shares were valued at more than US$87 billion at the peak.
Bezos also owns the Washington Post through a holding company.
Forbes said Bezos’ net worth was about US$90.6 billion when the market opened on Thursday, while Gates had US$90.1 billion.
Forbes said Gates would have been the undisputed leader had he not given billions of dollars to various philanthropic causes.
Bezos issued a request for philanthropic ideas in a tweet last month, just before Amazon announced a US$13.7 billion deal for organic grocer Whole Foods Market Inc.
The changes in Bezos’ fortune coincided with Amazon’s report of a 77 percent decline in quarterly profit on heavy spending.
Shares fell another 2 percent in after-markets trading as the company missed Wall Street’s expectations on profit.
Amazon said it earned US$197 million, or US$0.4 per share, in the second quarter, down from US$857 million, or US$1.78 per share, a year earlier.
Analysts surveyed by Zacks investment Research were expecting earnings of US$1.4 per share on revenue.
Revenue grew 25 percent to US$38 billion, compared with US$30 billion a year earlier.
That topped expectations of US$37.2 billion.
However, Amazon has long been known for investing the money it makes back into its businesses.
For the second quarter, Amazon reported operating expenses of US$37 billion, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier.
In a conference call, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky told investors that there would be even more spending in the second half of the year.
Amazon would continue to open new warehouses to fulfill orders, even though sales tend to slow down in the third quarter before rising again during the holidays, he said.
He also said Amazon has been spending more to acquire video for its streaming service and to lease properties for data centers to meet growth in its cloud-services business.
Just a day earlier, Amazon said it plans to hire thousands of warehouse workers on the spot at job fairs across the US.
Nearly 40,000 of the 50,000 jobs will be full time and most of them will count toward Amazon’s previously announced goal of adding 100,000 full-time workers by the middle of next year.
Amazon will be spending even more to buy Whole Foods if the deal goes through, as expected.
Olsavsky said he expects Whole Foods will complement Amazon’s other channels for selling groceries, including AmazonFresh deliveries and an experimental Go convenience store in Seattle.
“There’s no one solution,” he said. “We’ll see how customers respond.”
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
RSS