Jeff Bezos Sells $4 Billion of Amazon Shares

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 14, 6:30AM EST

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Jeff Bezos Sells $4 Billion of Amazon Shares — © David Ryder / Getty Images

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), is the second richest person in the world. He has a net worth of $193 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Over the past four days, he has turned $4 billion of that fortune into something other than Amazon stock, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

No one except Bezos and his inner circle knows why he sold the shares now. He reportedly plans to move to Florida. His current residence is in Washington, a state where the capital gains tax is 8%. Florida does not have a capital gains tax. According to other SEC filings, Bezos has a 10b5-1 plan, which means he plans to sell a fixed number of shares on future dates.

Several billionaires, including Carl Icahn and Ken Griffin, have moved to Florida. Almost certainly, they moved due to the state’s favorable tax rates. (These are the richest Americans in history.)

Bezos has sold his shares as Amazon stock has surged recently. The share price is up 69% in the past year. The S&P 500 is 20% higher over the same period. The reason for the increase is, at least in part, Amazon’s financial performance. Last year, revenue rose 12% to $575 billion. Net income for the year was $30 billion, compared to a loss of $2.7 billion in the previous year.

Jeff Bezos no longer runs Amazon. He gave up the chief executive’s job to become the executive chair of the board of directors on July 5, 2021, and was replaced as CEO by Andy Jassy.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.