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 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos just had one of those days that we all have from time to time. He officially became the second richest human on the planet, and he shut down a business that was founded by one of his bitter rivals. 
 
 Bloomberg reports that Bezos’ personal fortune increased by a cool $1.5 billion today following a big jump in Amazon’s stock price. The $18.32 rise in the online retailer’s value was fueled by the announcement that it will acquire the Dubai-based Souq.com, a deal that Goldman Sachs called, “the biggest-ever technology M&A transaction in the Arab world.” 
 
 From the report: 
 
 Bezos has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $700 million more than Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Buffett and $1.3 billion above Ortega, the founder of Inditex S.A. and Europe’s richest person. Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth and $7 billion since the global equities rally began following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8. The rise is the third biggest on the Bloomberg index in 2017, after Chinese parcel-delivery billionaire Wang Wei’s $18.4 billion gain and an $11.4 billion rise for Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg. 
 
 That makes two reasons that Bezos can be happy about Trump being in the White House. Not only have the markets been making rich people richer in anticipation of a big tax cut, but the Bezos-owned Washington Post has been thriving with so much scandal to report on. According to Politico, “The Post has seen a 75 percent increase in new subscribers since the first of the year and says it has doubled digital subscription revenue over the year.” That goes against every trend in the newspaper industry. 
 
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 But for every winner in the world of business, there has to be a loser. Today, that loser is Marc Lore, the founder of Quidsi. The company operated sites like Diapers.com and Soap.com—charmingly descriptive brand names that call back to an earlier online era. Lore and Bezos had a vicious feud in the aughts that was fueled in part by a price war over diapers. Amazon cut its prices continuously and eventually forced Quidsi to agree to a buyout in 2010. Lore worked at Amazon for a couple of unhappy years and is now trying to defeat Bezos once again with Jet.com. Today, Amazon announced that Quidsi will end its operations and 263 people will be laid off. 
 
 It might seem odd to think it’s a good thing for the Amazon CEO to shutter a company he paid $545 million to buy, but you have to understand the minds of petty men. For Silicon Valley tycoons, the businesses they start are like their children. Lore saw his child executed today and he’s currently running a business that was almost destroyed by Amazon until Wal-Mart jumped in and bought it. 
 
 Today, Jeff Bezos has crushed his enemies and seen them driven before him. But he’s still only number two. He’ll need another $10.4 billion to catch up with Bill Gates. Watch your back, Bill. 
 
 [Bloomberg, Business Insider, Reuters] ||||| Update: As of 1:30 p.m. Eastern, Jeff Bezos had dropped below Bill Gates on Forbes' Real-Time Ranking, and Gates ended the day as the world's richest person. 
 
 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has overtaken Bill Gates and is now the richest person in the world, with a fortune topping $90 billion for the first time ever. 
 
 When markets opened on Thursday, Bezos had a net worth of $90.6 billion, putting him $500 million ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.4 billion to Bezos’ net worth. That was enough to put him ahead of Gates, who was last surpassed on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days nearly a year ago by Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega. 
 
 Forbes started tracking billionaires around the globe in 1987. Bezos is now the seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the third American to top the global ranks besides Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. 
 
 Also on Forbes: 
 
 While Buffett appeared on Forbes’ first ranking of America’s 400 Richest people in 1982 and Gates joined four years later, Bezos is a newer addition to Forbes’ wealth rankings. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 in 1998, a year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune. Bezos ranked third richest in the world on Forbes 2017 list of the World's Billionaires, published in March, with a fortune of $72.8 billion. 
 
 Bezos would be nowhere close to being the world’s wealthiest person had Gates not given so much of his fortune to philanthropy. Gates, who created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes, had given away $31.1 billion over the course of his lifetime through end of 2016. Forbes estimates that Bezos, who has not signed the pledge, had given approximately $100 million to charity through the end of 2015. In June, Bezos tweeted out a request for ideas for his philanthropy, garnering thousands of responses. 
 
 Bezos attended Princeton and then worked at a hedge fund before starting his online bookseller in a garage in Seattle in 1994. Amazon has since grown into an online retail behemoth selling a wide range of products. It also offers cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division, known as AWS. Outside of his day job, Jeff Bezos owns aerospace company Blue Origin and the Washington Post. 
 
 Gates' fortune is built on software firm Microsoft, which he founded in 1975 with his friend Paul Allen. Gates has sold off much of his Microsoft stake but still owns about 2% of the company's shares, worth about $12.4 billion -- just under 14% of his fortune. His investment firm Cascade Investments has ploughed Gates' money into a wide variety of assets, including public stocks, real estate, private equity and venture capital. Gates owns stakes in companies as diverse as Canadian National Railway, hygiene technologies firm Ecolab and Mexican Coke bottler Femsa. 
 
 Editor's note, July 27: This post was updated to accurately reflect Bill Gates' lifetime giving through 2016 and his first year on the Forbes 400. ||||| Shares in retail giant Amazon soared 18% in after-hours trading on Thursday, making it the most valuable retail company in the world, after the company announced an unexpected profit and a sharp rise in sales for its latest quarter. 
 
 Amazon at 20: what has the online giant ever done for retail? Read more 
 
 The share price hike added more than $7bn to the $34.7bn fortune of founder Jeff Bezos in less than 45 minutes. 
 
 As the shares climbed, they surpassed those of Walmart, making Amazon the highest-valued company in retail in the world. An hour after it announced its earnings, Amazon was valued at approximately $270bn while Walmart had closed with a valuation of $233bn. 
 
 For the second quarter ending on 30 June, Amazon reported a $92m profit and gains of $0.19 per share instead of the $0.13 loss Wall Street analysts had expected. While analysts expected the company to do better than it did a year ago, when it posted a loss of $126m, they had expected the revenue growth to be closer to 16% with revenue reaching $22.4bn. Instead, revenue rose to $23.19bn. 
 
 Amazon had a lot to celebrate this quarter, according to Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. The better-than-expected results came just a week after the company celebrated its 20th anniversary. 
 
 “The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers,” he said on Thursday. “We unveiled Amazon Business, opened Amazon Mexico, launched Prime free same-day, rolled out our ninth Prime Now city, broke our Black Friday record with the first-ever Prime Day, received 11 Emmy nominations for Transparent, debuted six new kids’ pilots, brought Echo to general availability, introduced the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service, opened FBA Small and Light, continued to double down on our fastest-growing geography – India, launched 350 significant AWS [Amazon Web Services] features and services so far this year (ahead of last year’s pace), introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms – enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40% renewable energy.” 
 
 Leading authors call for government probe of Amazon's 'damaging' power Read more 
 
 Much of the growth reported this quarter can be attributed to the company’s Amazon Web Service, AWS, which is the company’s collection of remote cloud computing services. 
 
 This is the second quarter since Amazon began disclosing revenue and operating profit for AWS and for the second time, the growth for this division surprised Wall Street analysts. In the first quarter, AWS revenue was up 49% from 2014. This time around, the revenue for AWS rose 81% from a year ago, reaching $1.82bn by 30 June. 
 
 Thomas Szkutak, Amazon CFO, also pointed out that Amazon is the largest AWS customer. 
 
 When asked whether the fact that the Fire phone was not mentioned by name in Thursday’s release meant that analysts should “chalk it up to a learning experience”, Szkutak said the company does not comment on a roadmap of products and has nothing to offer. He did, however, add that the company learns from everything it does and values feedback from its customers. 
 
 It has not all been smooth sailing for Amazon. 
 
 At the beginning of this month, the company informed writers whose works are available through Kindle Owners’ Lending Library that they will not be paid per download but instead for page read at the rate of $0.006 per page. Up until then, authors were paid $1.30 per download. This means that only authors whose books are 220 pages long or longer and are read from cover to cover will make the same or more in the future. 
 
 About two weeks later, leading authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Chabon and Ann Patchett penned a letter to the US Department of Justice demanding that it investigate the retailer’s “power over the book market”. ||||| Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos became the fifth richest person in the world on Thursday, after gaining more than $7 billion in a a single hour as Amazon stock spiked during after-hours trading. FORBES now estimates his net worth at $50.3 billion, as of 5:15 p.m. ET. 
 
 During Thursday's earnings call, Amazon surprised investors by reporting a net profit and topped analysts' sales estimates for the second quarter, causing Amazon stock to increase more than 18% in after-hours trading. Amazon reported a second quarter net income of $92 million, or 19 cents per share. During the same period last year, Amazon had a net loss of $126 million, or 27 cents per share. According to a group of 36 analysts polled by Yahoo , the Seattle-based company was expected to lose an average of 14 cents per share. The news of Amazon's strong second quarter is a happy end to July, after Amazon's Prime Day left consumers disappointed. 
 
 Bezos is now the 5th richest person in the world, stealing the spot from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison who has a net worth of $48.6 billion. 
 
 Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. Four years later, he appeared on FORBES' list of the 400 richest Americans for the first time with a net worth of $1.6 billion in 1998. Bezos became one of the top 20 richest people in America with a net worth of $12.6 billion in 2010 and appeared on the FORBES' Power People list for the first time that year.
– Jeff Bezos is having a pretty good month, even by the standards of stratospherically wealthy tech tycoons. Last night, just days after the Amazon.com founder celebrated the company's 20th anniversary, he made $7 billion in under 45 minutes as the company's share price soared in after-hours trading, reports the Guardian. The 18% share price gain came after the company surprised analysts by reporting a large profit and a 26% rise in North American sales year-on-year, CNBC reports. Bezos is now the fifth-richest person in the world with an estimated fortune of $50.3 billion, according to Forbes. Amazon has now passed Walmart to become the highest-valued retail company in the world, and in a press release, Bezos lists many recent successes, including Prime Day, the establishment of Amazon Business and Amazon Mexico, and new agreements for solar and wind farms. But one glaring failure for Amazon appears to be its relationship with authors, the Guardian notes. Earlier this month, a group of authors including Ursula Le Guin and Malcolm Gladwell joined the American Booksellers Association in calling for the Department of Justice to investigate the firm's "abuse of its dominance in the world of books." (Last fall, analysts wondered how the company could rein in Bezos.)