Jeff Bezos to dump $4.75bn in Amazon stock

Today, regulatory filings have shown that the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, wants to sell up to $4.75 billion worth of shares in the e-commerce business over the next 12 months.

Bezos, who quit as CEO of the Seattle-based tech company in the middle of 2021, will sell up to 25 million shares. He will follow through with a planned sale that will last until the end of May 2026.  According to Amazon’s most recent quarterly report, the trade plan was made in early March.

Bezos is directing his funds to other projects

Bezos has been trying to cut down his expenses. The first thing he did was to move from Washington to Florida. According to research done by Forbes, Florida is a better place for billionaires like Bezos to sell their assets than his old home state of Washington, which just put a 7% tax on long-term capital gains of more than $250,000. 

This is because Florida doesn’t have either a state income tax or a capital gains tax. If Bezos had still lived in Washington when he sold his shares, he would have had to pay $954 million in state capital gains tax last year. With other deductions and credits, he may still owe about $3.2 billion to the federal government.

After moving,  Bezos sold more than $13.4 billion worth of Amazon stock. The same year, the company’s market value grew to more than $2 trillion. This was largely due to investors’ excitement about AI.

The second-richest person in the world has slowly taken his attention off of the online store he started in 1994 and put it back on his space company, Blue Origin, and the US newspaper, The Washington Post. 

Bezos is the only partner in Blue Origin and has sold Amazon shares to help pay for it. To compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s space exploration business, Blue Origin wants to adopt Amazon’s focus on results-driven work style. 

Blue Origin’s CEO Dave Limp and CFO Allen Parker are two people that Bezos hired from Amazon. Blue Origin has only sent one rocket into orbit so far, while SpaceX has sent over 400 ships into orbit.

Bezos has also sold both large amounts of Amazon stock and smaller amounts to raise money for charitable causes. For example, he started the Day One Fund, an educational Montessori-inspired non-profit organization.

Amazon’s stock is taking a hit.

The news came just hours after Amazon announced on Thursday night that it expected net sales and operating income to be lower than what Wall Street had expected. This is mainly because of President Trump’s trade war with other countries.

To lessen the effects of tariffs, Amazon has been negotiating big discounts with suppliers. About a quarter of the things it sells come from China.

Before Amazon’s earnings report, Goldman Sachs analysts said that the tariffs could cut the company’s operating profits by $5bn to $10bn this year, based on how the trade war turned out. That would take a 6–12% bite out of the $79.2bn operating earnings that Wall Street expects for the new fiscal year.

On Thursday, the Seattle-based company thought it would make between $13 billion and $17.5 billion in operating income this quarter. That’s less than the $17.7 billion that Wall Street expected, but it was more than the $14.7 billion made last year.

Amazon also said that its net sales for the current quarter would be between $159 billion and $164 billion, which is less than the $161.4 billion that experts were expecting. Meanwhile, Amazon stocks are down 0.19%, trading at 189.84.

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