In a year when the biggest names in tech were embroiled in scandals, there's at least one executive who managed to get out of 2018 unscathed: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who saw his net worth increase by more than any of his billionaire peers.
Bezos claimed the title of world's richest person at the beginning of the year and unseated the Microsoft founder Bill Gates from his 24-year streak at the top of Forbes' ranking of the richest Americans. Now the Amazon CEO can say he increased his wealth in 2018 — by $24 billion, to be exact — by more than any of the richest 500 people in Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Bezos finished off the year with a net worth of $123 billion, and he's the only person on the list to have a 12-digit net worth. But that isn't even Bezos' peak net worth — over the summer, he surpassed a net worth of $150 billion to become the richest man ever in modern history.
To put that in perspective, Bezos makes almost $4.5 million in a single hour. With that wealth, spending $88,000 to him is like an average American spending $1, Business Insider calculated.
Bezos hasn't shown any signs of slowing down, if Amazon's rapid expansion in 2018 into cloud computing, pharmaceuticals, and other industries is any indication.
But while Bezos saw his net worth rise, other billionaires didn't see the same success. Amid Facebook's year of data leaks and a rise in public distrust of the company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost more money than anyone else on Bloomberg's index. Zuckerberg's net worth took a hit of almost $20 billion this year and is now pegged at a cool $52.9 billion.
Rounding out the top five billionaires on Bloomberg's ranking are Gates ($90 billion), the investor Warren Buffett ($82.9 billion), the CEO of LVMH, Bernard Arnault ($67.3 billion), and the Spanish fashion executive Amancio Ortega ($58.7 billion).
