14 DAY TRIAL // The life of a large company CEO is not an easy one. Decisions that affect millions of people and involve billions of dollars aren't easy to make or live with and knowing that possibly tens of thousands of people more or less depend on you for their livelihood can be daunting, provided you care, anyway. Yet, there are some advantages of owning a huge stake in a multi-billion-dollar company, say Amazon, for example, as Founder, Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos probably knows already, like the fact that you can sell a very small portion of it, make $234 million, and still have a very large chunk of the company.
Perhaps feeling a little light in the wallet, cash-wise, Amazon's head honcho decided he could live without two million shares in the company he founded in 1994. As a SEC filling yesterday revealed, Bezos shed a small slice of his shares earlier this week netting him a cool $234 million.
It's not exactly clear what he plans to do with the sum, not that he's going to say it in a regulatory filing, but TechFlash, which uncovered the filing in the first place, speculates he might be needing it to fund his side-project/hobby Blue Origin, an aerospace company he created in 2000, which plans to send people in suborbital flights in a couple of years or so.
Now, before you start worrying about his stake in Amazon after selling off two million shares, you need to know that Bezos still holds a very comfortable 92,158,027 shares in the company, that's 46 times the amount of shares he sold. You probably don't want to know just how much that's worth.
And, from the looks of it, it's going to be worth even more in the future, as Amazon has been seeing some very good results lately and is also solidifying its position in a couple of promising markets, notably the e-book market, where it pretty much dominates with its Kindle e-reader/e-book store.