Bill Gates Regains Top Spot as World’s Richest Person from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

In an interesting turn of events, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, outshined Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, as the wealthiest man in the world. Bill Gates who has held the top spot since May 2013, became the second richest man in the world when Amazon.com registered a slight surge in its shares on Thursday. However Jeff could relish the moment only for a few hours as the online retailer's stocks fell back again post its second quarter earnings report.

Jeff exceeded Gates with just 1% spurt in stocks. However, the brief play of stocks rendered Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the richest person alive only for a few hours as he slipped back into second place later in the day. Bezos is now positioned second in the list worth $89.8 billion, just behind the $90 billion net worth of Gates. A difference of not even a billion dollars between the world’s richest guys can again change the top position of the list anytime depending on any fluctuation in stocks.

By 2:17 pm in New York, shares of the largest internet based retailer in the world traded at $1,055.37 and climbed as high as $1,083.31. While Gates had a net worth of $90.8 billion by the Wednesday close, the spike in Amazon’s shares resulted in rise of Jeff’s net worth to $92.3 billion. Shares later dropped back, closing down at $1,046.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ended the week as the world’s second richest person for the first time with a net worth of $89.8 billion in a day and more than $3 billion in the past week. The change in rise of shares made a little difference for the billionaires but a huge one in Bloomberg’s list of top players in the wealthiest people’s list.