Jeff Bezos, amid a busy 12 months, is selling a bunch of Amazon stock
Jeff Bezos has been busy this month selling a massive amount of Amazon stock.
The Amazon founder and executive chairman’s sales have occurred in three separate sales and involved nearly 36 million shares to date, filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.
The shares in the e-commerce giant were collectively worth $6.15 billion after Bezos sold them at a range of prices across six different days.
The number of shares and their value in the three rounds of sales, which started Feb. 7, have been relatively consistent. Each disposed of nearly 12 million shares for about $2 billion.
What is driving Bezos to offload the shares? The tech billionaire, whose personal fortune is $190.7 billion according to Forbes, has not publicly given a reason.
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FOX Business reached out to Amazon and Bezos representatives for comment on the matter.
Yet, despite the lack of an announced reason behind the Amazon stock offloading, the SEC filings did tie the transactions to a trading plan that Bezos has as a company insider. That plan, recently disclosed by the tech giant, has been in place since early November.
The trading plan allows for the sale of a maximum of 50 million shares by Jan. 25 of next year, Amazon has said. An SEC filing pegged the aggregate market value of the 50 million shares at over $8.4 billion.
Accounting for the three rounds of sales this month, the e-commerce giant’s founder has up to 14 million more he can sell under the trading plan.
As of Thursday, his stake in Amazon amounted to about 952.26 million shares, according to a separate SEC filing.
The stock sales came amid what has seemingly been a busy past 12 months for Bezos that has included announcements of moves and an engagement.
The billionaire expressed intentions in early November of relocating from Seattle, saying he and fiancée Lauren Sanchez would make Miami their new home. While telling his social media followers about the decision, Bezos pointed to his parents, Blue Origin operations and his love of Miami as reasons for it.
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In recent weeks, reports have suggested that with the move, Bezos could see massive tax savings on stock sales in the Sunshine State compared to Washington, which recently implemented a 7% capital gains tax.
More than five months before announcing the move, he popped the question to Sanchez, whom he has been in a relationship with for many years.
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She told Vogue in mid-November that the couple is "still thinking about the wedding" and "what it’s going to be."
"Is it going to be big? Is it going to be overseas? We don’t know yet," she reportedly said.