Black Friday Makes Jeff Bezos’s Wealth Hit the $100-Billion Mark

Black Friday is good Friday for Bezos!

Jeff Bezos announcing Kindle at an event. 

(Photo: Reuters)

Black Friday turned into a ‘good Friday’ for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth shot up by $2.4 billion to hit the $100-billion mark.

The online retailer’s shares jumped 2 percent the day after Thanksgiving in America, while online shopping was up by 18.4 percent compared to last year, Bloomberg reported.

The new triple-digit billion mark makes 53-year-old Bezos the first business mogul to hit that mark since Bill Gates did in 1999. Bezos’s wealth has swelled by $32.6 billion just this year, with Amazon’s stocks gaining 5 percent just this week.

Questions arise about what Bezos plans to do with his mounting wealth. Unlike the others who have held the “richest person in the world” title – Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg – Bezos has donated relatively less to charity and philanthropy.

Gates’s current net worth sits at a sweet $86 billion but could have been over $150 billion had he not given $700 million Microsoft Corp shares and $2.9 billion away in charity, according to the analysis done of his wealth’s public disclosures in 1996.