Jeff Bezos No Longer Richest Man In The World, Amazon Stock Drowns Net Worth

What a difference a bad earnings report makes.

Amazon.com Inc. founder and CEO Jeff Bezos temporarily lost his bragging rights as the richest person on the planet Thursday when a 7 percent plunge in Amazon's stock price due to upsetting third quarter results left him with a net worth of "only" $103.9 billion.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates again ascended to number one with a net worth of $105.7 billion, according to Forbes.

Gates was the richest person in the world for an incredible 24 years until Bezos overtook him in 2018. It was a very short reign for Bezos as number one. Bezos, however, will likely regain top spot, probably as early as next week, when Amazon's stock recovers fully from its setback Thursday.

On Thursday afternoon, Amazon disclosed a 26 percent plunge in net income for its third quarter, its first profit drop since 2017. After hours saw a continuation of the decline, with Amazon yielding 9 percent and falling to $1,624 in the 20 minutes after the market closed at 4:00 p.m. EDT. Amazon's stock has since rebounded slightly to $1,657 per share.

It's also worth remembering Bezos would still be the richest of the rich if he hadn't surrendered a fourth of his wealth to his estranged wife, Mackenzie, as part of the largest divorce settlement in history. The Bezoses announced their divorce in January.

Mackenzie now owns four percent of Amazon. As of July, Mackenzie controlled 19.7 million shares of Amazon, which had a value at the time of $38.3 billion. This massive sum was enough to make Mackenzie the 22nd richest on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is a ranking of the world's 500 richest people.

The divorce left MacKenzie with $35.6 billion in Amazon stock as of April compared to Jeff’s $107.4 billion. The settlement makes MacKenzie the fourth-richest woman in the world behind Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of L’Oreal, Alice Walton of Walmart and Jacqueline Mars of Mars Inc.

A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows MacKenzie will retain shares representing about 4 percent of Amazon’s outstanding common stock. Her holdings will make her the third-biggest Amazon shareholder behind her ex-husband and Warren Buffet’s Vanguard Funds.

Gates resigned as chairman of Microsoft since 2014 but remains a salaried board member. He has sold or given away most of his Microsoft stake to charity. He's co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private charitable foundation in the world.

In 1987, Gates joined Forbes’ first ever billionaires list with a net worth of $1.25 billion (a paltry sum by today's mega standards). Bezos first got onto The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1998, just one year after Amazon went public. He had a net worth of $1.6 billion at the time.