Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sells stock worth $1.1 Bn to fuel aerospace firm Blue Origin

To fuel his dream to send humans to space, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has sold a million Amazon Inc shares this week for $1.1 billion, as per US securities filing on Friday.

Earlier, Bezos had expressed his intention to sell shares worth $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin LLC. Blue Origin is Bezos’ rocket company aiming to send people into space. To fund the operations, Bezos had sold another batch of a million shares in May.

A Bloomberg report stated that the sale represented 1.3% of his holding. The sale leaves Bezos with a 16.4% stake in the retailer. With this recent sale, Bezos currently owns 78.8 million Amazon shares. Amazon’s stock closed at $1,111.60 on Friday, taking his worth to about $87.6 billion.

Bezos recently became the world’s richest man with a net worth of about $93.1 billion fortune. He is currently $3.1 billion richer than Gates, who ended the day with a net worth of $90 billion.

The US-based retail giant is bullish on its growth plans in India as well to bolster its position against homegrown e-commerce firm Flipkart. After doubling its seller base in less than a year, the firm is almost all set to double its office footprint in the country. Recently it was reported that the firm has planned to lease another 2.5 million sqft up from its already existing 3.1 million sqft across India.