Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the current richest man in the world, yet he is still cashing out his Amazon shares at an alarming rate. He sold $990 million of Amazon’s shares last Thursday and Friday according to new filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite selling $1.8 billion worth of stock earlier that same week, totaling to roughly $2.8 billion in stock sold.
According to the filings, these transactions were pre-arranged as part of a 10b5-1 trading plan, though an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the sale of stocks and why they had been accelerated by the company’s CEO.
Previously, Bezos has said that he would sell $1 billion in Amazon stocks annually to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. With his wealth still being around $110 billion, he said in an interview last year that “the only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.”
However, there’s no word on why he has been accelerating his stock sales, though he is also deploying capital for the “Day One” fund, which was announced back on 2018 as a resource for creating preschools and helping homeless families.
According to the filings, Bezos offloaded approximately 530,000 Amazon shares on two separate sales at a price of about $1,850 per share. And yet, he still owns more than 57 million shares in the company, or about 12% of all of its stock.
Whether or not this acceleration in stock sales is due to some plan for space travel or a return to the moon seems somewhat likely, considering Bezos himself has recently stated an intention to do exactly that. However, with no comment from either him or a spokesperson, we can’t know with absolute certainty if that is why he started selling the stock at an accelerated rate.
However, it likely doesn’t make that much of a difference; with how much stock Bezos owns in the company, it’s hardly like an extra billion or so really affects much of his proceedings or his yearly schedule. Still, if he has already accelerated the process once, one would be forgiven for wondering if he has more stock to sell this coming week, or if he is going to pump the brakes after selling more than he claimed to have planned for annually.
