Jeff Bezos won USD 10 in a curious purchase of just one Amazon share

Jeff Bezos, the third richest person in the world, did something strange two weeks ago: bought a single Amazon share for $114.77.

It’s about your first buy of actions in records dating back to 2002. The Amazon founder is best known for selling: he has dumped close to USD 30,000 million in stocks since 2002 to fund his various ventures, from the Blue Origin spacecraft company to personal pleasures like his new USD superyacht Koru 500 million.

After Amazon’s initial public offering in 1997, Bezos has received no further shares in compensation and accepted only a small salary. He still owns about 10% of the company, which accounts for most of his fortune from $148 billionaccording to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The May 25 purchase of that single stock boosted his fortune by about $10, as Amazon shares traded around $124 on Friday, buoyed by a broader rally in the tech sector that led to the S&P 500 Index. to a bull market this week.

Bezos’s move has confused Amazon analysts and stock watchers who don’t know what to make of the singular purchase. Theories abounded on social media: One person speculated that Bezos planned to give the physical certificate as a gift, while others joked that he must have accidentally clicked the buy button in his brokerage account.

“I needed one more share to regain control,” joked Mark Shmulik, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein (Bezos owns 9.7% of Amazon’s shares and retains voting control of the 2.9% stake owned by MacKenzie Scott, his ex-wife, according to data collected by Bloomberg).

Shmulik’s serious response, like everyone else’s, was: “I’m trying to figure out why he did that.”

Then there’s the theory that Bezos is following the lead of the king of memes, Elon Musk.

The Bezos purchase was reported the next day at 4:20 p.m. New York time, according to an SEC filing. He also donated 69,290 shares worth nearly $8 million to a nonprofit organization, according to the document. The childish humor implicit in the numbers led several people to speculate that perhaps he is trolling us.

(With information from Bloomberg)

Keep reading: