By Nearly $16 billion was shaved off his wealth on Friday alone, as that figure was lopped off the former Amazon leader after the company's stock saw its largest drop in over two years. Shares moved below $1,677 after the release of the second-quarter revenue report, falling an unexpected 9%. Quarterly revenues came in at $147.9 billion, compared with the analyst consensus of $148.5 billion. That represents the largest one-day decline since the 14% drop on April 28, 2022. It occurred after Amazon missed expectations for earnings in the second quarter for the second quarter in a row. That takes about $15.9 billion off Bezos's stake in Amazon—928 million shares. It was valued at $170.8 billion when the markets closed on Thursday but has fallen to around $154.9 billion.
In that regard, Bezos now comes second in the list of the world's richest people whose net-worth reduction is almost 8% today, according to Forbes. The ten richest people in the world, to whom belong Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, and Mark Zuckerberg, had more than $1 billion hits each combined for the market.
Indeed, it was because the Labor Department's weaker-than-expected jobs report had shown that the United States' economy added about 71,000 fewer jobs than expected, which extended the dive in the stock market and gave rise to the fear of a likely recession. After heavy investments by Amazon in its cloud business, estimated at over 105 billion dollars annually, its CFO Brian Olsavsky said: "We're happy to have this kind of ratchet because it does show the strength of the business long-term." Actually, until recently, it wasn't interested in generative AI tools. It invested 30 billion dollars in Amazon Web Services; neither of which has translated into market confidence.
That launched Amazon to a two-trillion-dollar market capitalization last month on the back of a technology rally spearheaded by AI breakthroughs. However, recent market swings have called into question how such huge investment returns could be possible.