Loss: Jeff Bezos pictured with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez
After Amazon shares fell in New York, Jeff Bezos saw his fortune plummet to the tune of billions.
The tech company’s founder lost £6.5billion – though he is still worth £143billion – after the business blamed supply chain chaos for a sharp drop in sales growth in the third quarter of the year.
Bezos is now languishing far behind Elon Musk on the global rich list with the Tesla boss worth £210billion.
The electric car maker has seen a rise in demand in China while also addressing production problems that had been a problem.
Tesla shares have risen 170% over the last 12 month and were up 1.6 percent last night. Amazon sales rose by 15 per cent in the third quarter of the year to £80billion – a steep decline from the 27 per cent growth in the second quarter and the smallest increase since 2014. Profits fell from £4.6billion to £2.3billion, the first drop for more than a year. Amazon warned that growth would slow again during the Christmas period, raising the possibility of its first quarterly loss since 2015.
It was the first set to be published by Amazon’s quarterly results in its 27-year history, without Bezos as its chief executives.
Andy Jassy, the new boss, stated that the company is facing’several million dollars of additional cost’ due to a combination of problems in its supply chain as well as rising inflation.
Investors are starting to worry about US tech stocks. On Thursday, Apple disappointed investors by not meeting its sales forecasts due to its backlog of orders.
Apple shares fell another 4 per cent, giving the tech giant a market capitalisation of £1.8trillion.
Microsoft has been named the world’s most valuable publicly traded company after its share price fell. Microsoft has risen 45 per cent this year so far amid booming demand for its cloud computing services during the pandemic. Facebook is also having a difficult time lately and has renamed Meta.
Russ Mould is AJ Bell director. He said that Thursday was a turbulent evening across the pond as Amazon and Apple proved they are not immune from global supply chain challenges. Facebook, or Meta, also revealed a controversial name change.
“Whether this rebranding will prove to be more successful than Google’s 2015 switch to Alphabet, which still requires explanation six years later, remains to be determined.”