Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has continued his routine selling of Amazon shares to fund his other escapades. For a few years now, he’s had an arranged trading plan that sees him regularly sell Amazon stock worth billions of dollars.

• Jeff Bezos’ latest sell-off is of 739,000 Amazon shares worth around $2.5bn, SEC filings show. Another separate filing indicated that he plans to sell as many as 2 million shares that could net him nearly $7bn at current prices.

• This latest share sell-off from Bezos is noteworthy as one of his last in his position as Amazon’s CEO which he’s handing off soon to a top lieutenant named Andy Jassy. Jassy is currently CEO of AWS, Amazon’s very profitable cloud computing division.

• Usually, a CEO offloading large amounts of stock in a company he leads draws some displeasure from investors, but as Jeff Bezos would soon no longer be Amazon’s CEO, it opens up opportunities to sell larger amounts of shares than usual if the desires.

• Amazon’s stock has hit record levels as of late, making it easier for Jeff Bezos to sell relatively small amounts for billions of dollars and still maintain the coveted status of being the company’s largest shareholder.

  
  

• Save for Amazon, Bezos’s other corporate activities include his space exploration company Blue Origin and The Washington Post newspaper. As expected, self-funding a space exploration company eats up huge sums.

• Given his other activities outside Amazon, that Bezos regularly sells large blocks of Amazon stock isn’t surprising. Also at that, diversifying outside a company making up the bulk of your fortune is usual standard advice from financial advisors. 

• Ahem, Jeff Bezos is also reportedly building a new big sailing yacht so selling shares should come in handy in that case too 🙂

Photo credit: national museum of american history, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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