Jeff Bezos earned $6.4 billion in one day after Amazon stocks jumped 5.3 percent on Tuesday, with the price for one share trading at $2,283. The shares of the e-commerce and cloud computing giant have risen amid growth on the overall market with the S&P 500 climbing more than 2 percent. The spike in Amazon's shares lifted Bezos’ net worth to $138.5 billion.
Bezos is not the only member of Forbes’ list of richest people to have seen remarkable gains during the coronavirus pandemic. Shares of his rival Walmart have increased too with the combined net worth of the Walmart family rising to $169 billion, a 5 percent increase since the start of the year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk added $10.4 billion to his fortune.
Although the world’s 500 richest people have lost $553 billion this year due to economic slowdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, their combined net worth surged 20 percent from a low on 23 March.
Meanwhile, the jobless rate continuse to rise with the number of unemployment claims in the United States now exceeding 16 million.
