Jeff Bezos has sold $4 billion of Amazon.com Inc. stock in the past three years, including $1.1 billion just last week, using most of the money to support his space company, Blue Origin LLC.
That sets its business model apart from other billionaire-backed space ventures, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which have both taken outside funding and moved more quickly to commercialize operations.
...Selling stock to fund his operations means Bezos, 53, could face $200 million in capital-gains taxes on last week’s transactions. He told a space conference in April that he sells about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year to fund Blue Origin.
But with shares of the Seattle-based retailer on a tear, Bezos has more to burn than just rocket fuel. Last month, he overtook Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates as the world’s richest person, and ended Monday with a net worth of $95.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.
No comments:
Post a Comment