From the Guardian, March 27:
As trillions of dollars were wiped off stock markets some of the world’s richest got lucky
Millions of people across the world have lost their jobs, and trillions of dollars have been wiped off the value of stock markets.Oddly enough, although numerous other outlets have the story I don't see it in the WaPo feed.
But not everyone has lost out. Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, is $5.5bn (£4.3bn) richer today than he was at the start of the year. His paper fortune, held mostly in Amazon shares, rose by $3.9bn on Thursday alone to $120bn – enough to buy 188,000 standard gold bars (even taking into account the soaring price of gold).
Bezos, 56, benefited this week from the best three-day stock market rally since 1933 helping Amazon’s share price to recover almost all of its losses this month to trade at about $1,920, though that was slightly down on their peak of $2,170 in February. Bezos owns about 12% of Amazon’s shares.
He saved himself from larger losses by selling a big chunk of his Amazon shares in February, before the worldwide scale of the coronavirus crisis was fully acknowledged and before the stock market collapse.
Regulatory filings show that Bezos sold $3.4bn worth of Amazon shares in the first week of February, just before the stock price peaked.
There is no suggestion that Bezos acted improperly by selling the shares or that he was acting on non-public information about the impact of the pandemic. But his timing was near-perfect. The share sales, which represented about 3% of his total holding, were much greater than Bezos had made in previous months. The stock sold was as much as he had sold in the previous 12 months, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal....MORE
Also at the Guardian:
'Hell is coming': how Bill Ackman's TV interview tanked the markets and made him $2.6bn
