The world’s richest man will be even richer in a few years — the first trillionaire — and a global pandemic may only be speeding up that process.
Jeff Bezos’s name was trending on Twitter as an admittedly dated study made the rounds that projected the future wealth of the Amazon.com CEO.
Amazon.com’s AMZN, +0.46% sales topped $75 billion in the first quarter, driven by demand during the pandemic that has kept people at home and depending on at-home delivery services of everything from food to exercise equipment.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the net worth of Bezos has risen from $125 billion on April 12 to $143 billion on May 5, though that hasn’t been a straight line higher as the below chart shows.
Net worth of Jeff Bezos over the most recent quarter
Bloomberg
He also had to relinquish much of his wealth to his wife from a divorce proceeding last July.
Shares of Amazon are up about 28% year to date, though the road ahead could be a bit rocky ahead as the company has pledged to spend $4 billion or more to developing testing capabilities for all of its employees for COVID-19, “enhanced cleaning” of its facilities; and “higher wages for hourly teams.” Extra spending to cope with the pandemic may wipe out the company’s second-quarter profit.
Read:Amazon executive says he quit to protest firings of workers who spoke out
But Amazon will likely remain a favorite among investors as the potential for a second wave of the virus and more lockdowns, can’t be ruled out. And that’s not bad news at all for Bezos.
According to a survey from Comparisun, content and comparison platform for small and medium-sized businesses, Bezos could reach status as the world’s first trillionaire by 2026. That survey appears to be at least a few months old, and MarketWatch has reached out to the company to see if they have any updated information.
Here’s their chart of the world’s richest people and how close they are to the trillion-dollar wealth circle.
Explaining their methodology, Comparisun said it analyzed market capitalization of the 25 highest valued companies on the New York Stock Exchange according to Macrotrends, and the net worth of the world’s 25 wealthiest people, according to Forbes, in both cases taking the last five years of data (as of September 16th, 2019).
They then calculated average yearly percentage growth over the last five years, applying that growth rate for future years to come up with an idea of how that value would change.
Talk of Bezos impending trillionaire status was making the rounds on Twitter on Thursday, and let’s just say there was plenty of ire, as well an element of respect:
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