Jeff Bezos has once again ascended to the peak, reclaiming his position as the world’s richest person. Surpassing Elon Musk, the Amazon founder’s fortune reached an astonishing $200 billion, according to the latest data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Elon Musk, not far behind, boasts a net worth of $198 billion despite experiencing a significant financial setback over the past year. This reshuffling at the top comes after a period of intense competition among the world’s wealthiest.
Musk previously overtook Louis Vuitton-MoËT-Hennesy (LVMH) CEO Bernard Arnault in May 2023, entering the exclusive circle of centi-billionaires, which includes stars like Arnault and Bezos. These three moguls envisioned the title amid the dynamic decline and flow of the global economy and their respective business ventures.
The Amazon founder sold off a total of $ 4 billion worth of shares since mid-February, regulatory filings revealed.
At the same time, Tesla CEO and X chair, Musk, 52, saw a judge rule in late January that he must hand back the biggest pay packet in corporate history, at $ 55 billion, following accusations of the CEO strong-arming Tesla directors.
Bezos’ stock sales come after it emerged that he will set up his primary residence in Florida, taking advantage of the Sunshine State’s tax system.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021. His current title is executive chairman. In the space of a week, he’s shed nearly 25 million shares of the company. These are the first shares that he’s sold since leaving his role as CEO.
Earlier this month, Bezos, who is consistently named one of the wealthiest people in the world, said that he would sell 50 million of his Amazon shares by 2025 through brokerage firm Morgan Stanley.
Despite the sales, Bezos is still Amazon’s highest shareholder, owning close to ten percent of company stock.
Elon Musk Mocks Meta Amid Global Outage
Tech mogul Elon Musk made fun of his rival Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms after hundreds of thousands of users worldwide reported outages on their Instagram, Facebook, and Threads apps.
Musk embedded a post by Meta’s communications chief Andy Stone on an illustration showing three penguins with logos of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, saluting another penguin wearing sunglasses and an army chief uniform with a logo of X.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” Musk posted on X.
There’s no love lost between the two billionaire CEOs. Musk previously challenged the martial arts-loving Zuckerberg to fight in a “cage match”. The fight would be overseen by UFC president Dana White, with Elon Musk boasting that he’d found “an epic location” in Italy.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, there were more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and more than 20,000 reports for Instagram. Later, YouTube also reported similar issues. However, Meta’s WhatsApp is working seamlessly.
Many users complained that they were logged out of the social networking platforms. Some were asked to change passwords, while others were unable to refresh Instagram pages.
While logging into Threads, some users got an error message “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.”
Several users claimed that they were unable to log in to their Meta headsets too and turned to X to complain about issues faced by their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Social media giant Meta said that it was looking into a global outage of its Facebook, Instagram, and Threads platforms after users complained of being locked out of their accounts.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.
In 2021, Meta faced a similar outage across its platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours due to some configuration issues.
Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps.
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