Bezos continues selling spree, unloads $4 bn of Amazon stock in a week

Jeff Bezos continued his selling spree.

Amazon.com’s founder and chief executive officer disposed of two million shares in the past week, collecting more than $4 billion, according to regulatory filings. His latest sales were disclosed on Friday as the company’s stock hit fresh highs.

The transactions are part of a pre-arranged trading plan. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

That brings Bezos’s total stock sales to more than $14 billion, with the majority occurring in the past four years, according to calculations by Bloomberg. Bezos, 56, said in 2017 that he was selling about $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin, his space flight company. The rocket builder has since expanded operations and signaled its first human test flights this year.

Bezos has also been on a spending spree.

He was seen walking through the previews at Sotheby’s in November and reportedly set a record for artist Ed Ruscha at a Christie’s auction the same month with a $52.5 million purchase of “Hurting the Word Radio #2.” According to the same report, Bezos also bought “Vignette 19” by Kerry James Marshall for $18.5 million at Sotheby’s. The tech titan, meanwhile, has been hunting around for another Los Angeles home, according to agents there.

The scale of his stock sales — including $2 billion in 2017 and $2.8 billion in 2019 — partly reflects Amazon’s soaring valuation, which surpassed $1 trillion at the close of trading for the first time on Tuesday. The stock closed at $2079.28 on Friday. Bezos still owns about 11 per cent of Amazon, worth $115.5 billion.