Bezos reduced its Amazon (AMZN.US) stock holdings for the first time this year! The stock price reached a record high and instantly cashed out US$350 million on the same day

The Zhitong Finance App noticed that Jeff Bezos sold nearly 350 million US dollars of Amazon shares when Amazon (AMZN.US) stock prices hit a record high on Monday. This is the first time this year that he has sold shares in the company.

The deal was disclosed in a Form 4 regulatory document issued after the US stock market closed on Wednesday. According to another document two days ago, the billionaire said he plans to sell up to 15 million Amazon shares worth more than 4 billion US dollars, and this sale only accounts for a small portion of the plan.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the e-commerce retailer's stock price rose 18% during the year, Bezos' wealth increased by 38.7 billion US dollars this year, reaching 292 billion US dollars. After announcing strong revenue from the cloud computing business last week, Amazon recently became the fifth company with a market capitalization exceeding 3 trillion US dollars.

Even after this sale, Bezos is still far ahead with an 8.16% shareholding ratio and is still Amazon's largest shareholder.

Bezos, 62, has accelerated the pace of selling Amazon shares in recent years. Since 2020 alone, he has sold more than $38 billion in shares; by contrast, from Amazon's initial public offering in 1997 until 2020, he sold less than $10 billion in total. In nine trading days in 2024, he sold over $8.5 billion in shares.

Since the beginning of 2025, he has also donated more than $1 billion worth of Amazon stock to non-profit organizations, according to regulatory documents.

The billionaire's expenses have become more prominent in recent years, and a sharp increase in stock sales is taking place during this period. After moving to Florida at the end of 2023, Bezos spent over $230 million on real estate in the Miami area and spent about $500 million on a 417-foot superyacht.

Blue Origin, the aerospace company he founded in 2000, was previously wholly funded by Bezos, but now it is also carrying out external financing for the first time, with a valuation of 130 billion US dollars.