Breaking: Jeff Bezos Overtakes Bill Gates To Become World’s Richest Man

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has overtaken Bill Gates and is now the richest person in the world, with a fortune topping $90 billion for the first time ever, Forbes is reporting.

According to Forbes, Bezos had a net worth of $90.6 billion When the markets opened on Thursday, putting him more than $500 million ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.3 billion to Bezos’ net worth. That was enough to put him ahead of Gates, who was last surpassed on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days a year ago by Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega.

Bezos is now the seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the third American to top the global ranks beside Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett since Forbes started keeping the records in 1987.

He first appeared on the Forbes 400 in 1998, a year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune. Bezos ranked third richest in the world on Forbes 2017 list of the World’s Billionaires, published in March, with a fortune of $72.8 billion. His gross wealth actually grown tremendously between last year and now.

Bezos would be nowhere close to being the world’s wealthiest person had Gates not given so much of his fortune to philanthropy. Gates, who created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes, had given away $32.9 billion over the course of his lifetime by the end of 2016.

Perhaps, Bezos may also catch the philanthropy bug big time; although Forbes reports that he has given approximately $100 million to charity through the end of 2015. Recall that he requested for philanthropy ideas last month.

Request for ideas… pic.twitter.com/j6D68mhseL

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) June 15, 2017

Bezos attended Princeton and then worked at a hedge fund before starting his online bookseller in a garage in Seattle in 1994. Amazon has since grown into an online retail behemoth selling a wide range of products. It also offers cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division, known as AWS. Outside of his day job, Jeff Bezos owns aerospace company Blue Origin and the Washington Post.