Yep. Bezos owns around 16%. He recently sold about 1% in May 2016 (May 3-5), then another 1% in August 2016 (Aug 2-4). These caused roughly a 1% and 2% decline in the stock, respectively. In both cases it recovered within 3 days.
Obviously if he continued to liquidate his stock at around 2% absolutely per year, he'd reach zero in eight years. Bezos owning zero Amazon shares would be very weird if he was CEO, though. I imagine he could comfortably get down to owning 4-5% of Amazon without damaging the stock too much.
Disclaimer: I own Amazon through VFINX, and if you are Jeff Bezos and taking advice from my comment, uh, don't I guess.
I think it's safe to guess that Bezos didn't give up much more than 10% to get started for that. From what I recall his family also holds shares and invested, whether they were part of that group I don't know.
Bezos now owns roughly 20% (Forbes and Bloomberg peg his wealth around $20b to $25b usually depending on Amazon's market cap at the time), and he hasn't been an active buyer or seller for the most part over the years (he has sold a very small portion). So if Bezos retained 80% to 90% at the time of this deal, and assuming his shares weren't specially protected (and I'm not aware they were)....
If that group held 10%: each $50k is worth $125 million
If that group held 20%: each $50k is worth $250 million
That's assuming no sales occurred over time of course. That's a decent ballpark either way, and even if you skew the numbers either direction it's a massive return.
> Amazon's chief executive officer (CEO) and founder, Jeff Bezos, is the company's biggest shareholder, with 55.5 million shares representing 11.1% of outstanding shares.
Bezos's money might not be cash, but it's still relatively liquid: he owns about 10% of Amazon's shares, and could liquidate a very small percentage of that to generate billions of dollars of cash on hand. And, as a matter of fact, that's precisely what he's being doing[1].
That's right. Although based on some quick Googling Jeff Bezos owns 11% of Amazon which has a market cap of $1.4 trillion. So Bezos has generated about $1.2 trillion of wealth for other people.
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