Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this week sold more than $3 billion worth of shares in his company, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is expected to take home $2.3 billion after-tax, according to estimations by Forbes.
In recent times, the Amazon founder has pushed forward with the sales of his stake in the company. It accelerated offloading of his stock commenced in 2019 when he sold $2.8 billion worth of shares for that year alone. February this year, Bezos sold more than $4.1 billion worth of years.
By August, and the world’s richest man offloaded more than $3.1 billion of his shares. This brings to more than $10.2 billion so far, the number of shares Bezos has offloaded for 2020. He now owns a 10.6% stake in the company. However, the latest round of shares sales has not affected his significant 53 million shares in the company, worth about $170 billion, CNBC writes.
Amazon declined to give an official statement pertaining to the sale. However, the sales were part of transactions in a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan. Bezos sold his shares when Amazon stock was trading between $2,950 and $3,075 per share, according to the filings.
Bezos had hinted in the past the reason for the sales of his shares in the company when he said he plans to sell about $1 billion of Amazon stock to finance his rocket start-up, Blue Origin. The private spaceflight company was founded in 2000, focusing on rocket-powered vertical takeoff and vertical landing vehicles for access to suborbital and orbital space. This would make access to space cheaper and more reliable.
As part of his overall commitment to a safe environment for all, Bezos in February pledged a $10 billion Earth Fund to help combat the effects of climate change. This fund would be disbursed to the relevant activists, researchers, and organizations concerned with advocating against climate change. Bezos had also pledged to fund charities supporting the homeless and set up non-profit, Montessori-styled preschools for low-income neighborhoods.
There’s no official data yet on who gets what on his pledge for supporting climate change efforts. Still, recently, The Atlantic reported that Bezos is expected to give $100 million each to four organizations, including the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Source: cnbc.com
