NEW YORK, July 28 (Xinhua) -- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos briefly took the crown from Microsoft founder Bill Gates as the world's richest person on Thursday, thanks to the recent surge in the company's stock price.
Bezos' net worth reached 90.6 billion U.S. dollars on Thursday morning, bringing the Amazon founder and CEO to the top of the Forbes' Real Time Billionaires List, surpassing Microsoft founder Bill Gates by 500 million dollars.
But a dip in Amazon's stock price by the close of the market knocked Bezos out of the top spot behind Gates. Bezos finished the day with a fortune of 88.7 billion dollars, according to Forbes.
Bezos claimed the crown of the world's richest man thanks to a tremendous surge of Amazon's stock price in recent years.
The e-commerce giant's stock price touched the 1,000-dollar-per-share milestone for the first time at the end of May this year, doubling its price in less than two years from 500 dollars per share initially reached in July 2015.
Bezos currently owns about 80 million shares, or 17 percent, of the company, which he founded in 1994 in the garage of his home in Bellevue, Washington after quitting his job as a Wall Street executive.
Although Bezos' reign on top of the rich list lasted only a few hours, this is likely not Bezos' last time at the top of the Forbes ranking.
As of the close of markets Thursday, Bezos was only 1.1 billion dollars behind Gates, according to Forbes. Small fluctuations in Amazon's stock price may allow Bezos to dethrone Gates again.
