Jeff Bezos Increases His Fortune Under Trump’s Presidency

Jeff Bezos and President Donald Trump are not exactly buddies. Trump has made his dislike of Bezos more than clear on many occasions.

It may be that there is an element of jealousy at play since Bezos is incredibly wealthy. Not only has he a worth 37 times greater than Trump, but he has also been named as the world's second wealthiest man. 

CEO and founder of Amazon, Bezos also owns the Washington Post, a paper that is well-known for its aggressive reporting when it comes to Trump's Presidency. 

His business model, which has created success for Amazon, has meant cuts in the fortunes of real estate developers like Trump as more people turn away from brick-and-mortar stores in favor of online shopping.

Although many of Trump’s official activities have slowed Bezos down his fortune is still amassing at an incredible rate. Trump took office in 2017 at which point Bezos hit the number two position on The Forbes 400 list. 

At this time the richest American was Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft had been sitting in the number one spot since 1994. However, Bezos took the crown from Gates in 2018 becoming not only the richest man in the US but in the world.

Numbers Running Up Despite Trump's Administration

Amazon’s fortunes have continued to rise under Trump’s administration and Bezos has since added around $46 billion to his net worth. This is mainly due to increased business in Amazon and the new on-demand cloud computing platform.

In 2020 Bezos is showing a net worth of $115.6bn. His well-publicized divorce from his wife, MacKenzie, left him with $35billion less Amazon shares but he still holds the title of being the biggest winner under Trump’s administration.

Trump took office in 2017 and in that year Amazon Prime hit the 100million members mark. The e-commerce giant saw increases in sales worldwide that brought in around $160.4 billion. Amazon Web Services saw a huge increase of 43% with a revenue of $17.5billion. 

Before his divorce, Bezos still owned 16% of Amazon and hit the Forbes 400 List with a net worth of $81.6billion.

In 2018, Amazon's fortunes continued to rise with retail and service sales seeing a 29% increase from 2017 and revenue hitting $207.2 billion. At the same time, AWS saw a massive 47% increase in revenue. 

The company's stock rose in response and by October 2018 Bezos showed a personal net worth of more than double the previous year, coming in at $160 billion.

Mixing Up Business With Pleasure

In January of 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie were divorced. The couple had been together for 25 years and shortly after the announcement text messages from Bezos were leaked in the National Enquirer.

In response, Bezos accused National Enquirer’s parent company American Media of blackmail. He also said that the publication of the texts was politically motivated, citing a relationship between David Pecker, the CEO of American Media and Donald Trump.

In July 2019, Bezos parted with 25% of his stock in Amazon, reducing his share to 12%, as a result of his divorce. In the same month, Donald Trump announced that he was considering competing against Amazon in the bid for the Pentagon's $10billion cloud computer, a contract that was subsequently awarded to Microsoft.

Despite all of this Bezos saw an increase in the value of Amazon stock by 20%. The company's filings for the first 9 months of 2019 show an increase in sales worldwide – 18% for retail and services and 27% for web services. That said, there has been some fall-out from the divorce. 

This month he was replaced by a friend of Donald Trump at the top of the Forbes List. Frenchman, Bernard Arnault, has been adding to his fortune consistently since Trump took office and is now the richest person in the world.