Jeff Bezos' stock sale, revealed Friday in a U.S. securities filing Friday, totaled $1.1 billion, leaving the e-commerce king with a 16.4 percent stake in Amazon. The move followed two other selloffs by Bezos.
CNN reported it wasn't clear why Bezos sold the stock.
Bezos announced in April that he would sell $1 billion in shares to support Blue Origin LLC, the rocket company dedicated to taking people into space, Bloomberg reported. He also sold a million shares in May.
Amazon's stock increased 13.5 percent after its latest earnings report, increasing Bezos worth more than $10 billion to more than $90 billion. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates tumbled to second place on the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index, at $88 billion, per CNN.
The index Monday listed Bezos at $94.6 billion with a year-to-date increase of $29.3 billion. Gates' worth, listed at $88.4 billion, has had a year-to-date increase of $5.97 billion.
CNN said Bezos' Blue Origin, which was founded more a decade ago, has promised to start making manned flights in April 2019, but so far has only conducted unmanned test flights.
Blue Origin, though, also aspires to build large rockets that would take satellites into space, allowing it to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance for big-money space contracts, CNN reported.
The broadcaster also speculated that Bezos may move cash to philanthropic efforts, which he suggested on Twitter in June.
"I'm thinking I want much of my philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now -- short term -- at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact," Bezos wrote on Twitter, pointing to the Seattle charity Mary's Place, which helps empower homeless families, as an example.
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