Jeff Bezos’s honeymoon plans seem to have involved a $5.7 billion Amazon share selloff

On June 27, the day Bezos and Sanchez said their vows, the billionaire sold millions of shares in online giant Amazon as part of a wider plan to offload stock.

An SEC filing seen by Fortune shows that on June 27, Bezos sold more than 3.3 million Amazon shares at a price of between $221 and $223 a share. The resulting windfall for the transaction date of his wedding alone was $735 million, per Fortune calculations.

And while other newlyweds might expect to see their wealth take a hit during their honeymoon, Bezos’s wealth soared as he continued his selloff with six further Form 4 filings made between late June and late July.

Between July 3 and 7, Bezos offloaded a further three million shares at approximately $224 apiece, on July 8 and 9 a further 500,000 shares were sold at a similar price, and between July and July 14 sold a further 6.7 million shares for between $224 and $226 per stock.

On July 15, Bezos sold a further 733,000 shares for $227 each, and between July 21 and 22 offloaded a further 6.6 million shares at $227.5 to $229.5 each. The most recent transaction, from July 23 and July 24, also offloaded more than 4.1 million shares at between $228 to $233 apiece.

The total selloff—and with Amazon stock up 5.5% over the past month alone—has netted Bezos some $5.7 billion in total, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates.

It’s easy to assume that offloading millions of shares would reduce Bezos’s stake significantly in the company with a market cap of near-$2.5 trillion. Not so, as the SEC filings reveal Bezos still owns approximately 884 million Amazon shares.

This puts him roughly on a par with some of Amazon’s largest institutional shareholders. Yahoo Finance, for example, reports Vanguard as the top institutional shareholder with 832 million shares.

With Amazon stock up 26% over the past year, and up roughly 46% over the past half decade, Bezos now sits on a net worth of $252 billion (per Bloomberg), making him the third-richest person on the planet.

Maintaining distance

Of course, Bezos himself isn’t orchestrating the sales of millions of shares on a weekly basis.

The SEC filings show the stock sales are occurring according to a SEC Rule 10b5-1 trading plan established in early May. The rule creates a standard practice for an officer of a publicly listed company to sell shares in a preplanned way, without accusations of insider trading.

The 10b5-1 plan has a number of stipulations, chief among them that a formula (not a person) determines the number, price, and date of the trades. A third party who cannot be influenced by the client must also be employed to conduct the sales. Similar action has been taken by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in recent weeks, who used 10b5-1 filings to offload shares while achieving a billionaire wealth status.

But Bezos’s SEC history also reveals the billionaire is offloading sales not only for wealth gain but for philanthropy.

On the 27th of June, the same day Bezos’s selloff began, Morgan Stanley filed a note on behalf of Bezos in a Form 144 filing. The filing reads: “On May 13, May 14, and June 3, 2025, the reporting person contributed 633,812 shares to non-profit organizations, which may have sold such shares during the three months preceding the date of this Form 144.”

The form does not reveal which organization received the shares.

While Bezos has not signed The Giving Pledge (a commitment from the world’s wealthiest to donate the majority of their fortune to philanthropy) he has publicly stated he intends to donate the majority of his wealth during his lifetime to philanthropic causes, telling CNN in 2022 he was “building the capacity to be able to give away this money.”