Jeff Bezos sold $1.8B worth of Amazon stock as market value topped $1T

Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, just got richer. 

Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, cashed out of his shares as the stock skyrocketed recently. He sold more than $1.8 billion of shares in his company over the past week, new filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show.

He began selling his shares on Jan. 31 through Feb. 3, according to a pre-arranged sales plan. Bezos sold a total of 905,456 shares in the company for $1.84 billion, the filings show.

To be sure, Bezos has made similar sale disclosures in the past. Last summer he sold nearly $3 billion of his stock. Bezos has previously said that he would sell $1 billion in stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. Bezos still owns about 12% of Amazon. 

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The disclosure comes after Amazon’s market value eclipsed $1 trillion, a threshold it first touched in 2018. The company joins three other tech peers to top the milestone including Apple, Google parent company Alphabet and Microsoft.

Shares have jumped 11% so far this year, outpacing a 3% rise in the broader Standard & Poor’s 500.

Amazon shares have soared over the past week after the e-commerce giant delivered fourth-quarter earnings results on Thursday that topped analysts’ expectations.