Bezos Leaves CEO Post With a Pretty Penny in His Pocket

Jeff Bezos may be giving up his CEO title, but he'll hold onto world's richest man honors, at least for now. The Amazon chief officially hands over the reins Monday to Andy Jassy, the head of the company's web services, but not before amassing a net worth that puts Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg to shame. According to Forbes' "Real-Time Billionaires" list, the 57-year-old Bezos is currently worth $201.8 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts that number slightly higher, at $203 billion, which means he's amassed upward of $196 billion since he first popped up on the list in 1998, per USA Today. Just over the past two years his net worth has jumped 73%, the paper adds. The vast majority of his fortune lies in Amazon, with other funds pouring in from his ownership of the Washington Post and rocket company Blue Origin.

To put that in context, Insider estimates his net worth to be 739,489 times that of the median net worth of an American set to retire at age 65, or $266,400 (though that number is likely even higher, as the Bloomberg figure it based its calculations on jumped from the time of calculation). "He's more than twice as wealthy as the entire British monarchy ... and his fortune exceeds some nations' GDPs," and he "makes more money every second than the average US worker makes in a week" the outlet notes. But while he's set to head into space with his brother later this month, Bezos isn't totally stepping away from the company he founded: He'll stay on as Amazon's executive chairman, and he'll remain the company's largest individual shareholder, per CNN Business. (More Jeff Bezos stories.)