US Department Made Jeff Bezos $8.4 Billion Richer With a Contract

The US Department of Defense has significantly sweetened Jeff Bezos’ departure as Amazon boss. The decision to also award a large cloud contract to his company quickly made him $ 8.4 billion richer.

The Pentagon actually wanted to award a large contract for the operation of cloud services to Microsoft. This involved a sales volume of around $10 billion. Amazon complained, however, that the Redmond company only got the bid because then US President Donald Trump personally had problems with Bezos. The resulting dispute has meanwhile also preoccupied several courts.

Now, however, the Pentagon is trying itself in a Solomonic solution and announced that it will split up the order and award it in parts to Microsoft and Amazon. As a result, it became clear why the retail group was so interested in being a part of it. It was not just about the volume of orders, but also about the prestige, which in turn is good for being able to conclude other large contracts.

Elon Musk left behind

The decision of the Pentagon caused Amazon’s share price to rise directly by 4.7 percent, reports the US news outlet Bloomberg. The large shares that the founder of the company still holds in the company made his private fortune climb to a new record: Bezos owns $211 billion and is currently by far the richest person in the world in the rankings of several US publications.

A few months ago, Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk were down close together in matters of private wealth. However, the Amazon price climbed by around 20 percent in the course of this year, which makes the situation clearer. Musk’s net worth is currently estimated at $ 180.8 billion. Bezos has headed Amazon for the past 27 years and retired from the position this week. In the future, he will exert influence through the Supervisory Board. In addition, he still has around 11 percent of the shares, which also gives his vote corresponding weight.