Jeff Bezos has 100 billion reasons to be thankful this holiday season.
Fresh bets that Amazon made a bundle on Thanksgiving and Black Friday pushed the company’s stock to an all-time high, making its 53-year-old CEO the world’s first 100-billion-dollar-man since Bill Gates briefly held the title in 1999.
Amazon shares rose 2.6 percent, to $1,186, bringing the company’s market cap to more than $570 billion.
Bezos, who owns 78.9 million shares of Amazon, according to a securities filing this month, has seen his net worth climb by $32.6 billion in 2017.
Late last month Bezos passed Gates — whose generous charitable donations have affected his net worth in recent years — to become the richest man in the world.
In addition to being CEO of Amazon, Bezos owns Blue Origin, a private aerospace company, as well as The Washington Post, which he purchased for $250 million in 2013.
The e-commerce juggernaut flexed its muscles on a day that still sees shoppers flocking to malls and stores around the country to take advantage of deep discounts on hotly sought-after products.
Amazon slashed prices on devices such as Kindles and the Fire TV Stick, as well as on its line of Echo smart assistants — all of which can be used to make even more purchases from the Seattle-based Web giant.
Wall Street is betting that shoppers won’t be shy about conducting a significant portion of their holiday shopping on Amazon this year, but it wasn’t the only company that won on Friday.
Online sales on Thanksgiving reached $2.87 billion, according to Adobe Analytics, up 18.3 percent from the same point last year.
Shares of Macy’s and Kohls, as well as other retailers, jumped Friday following signs that consumers will be spending more money at their stores this holiday season.
Adobe Analytics predicts that the Black Friday shopping spree is only the beginning, and that online retailers led by Amazon will haul in another $6.6 billion on Cyber Monday.