The richest person in the world, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, added more money to his fortune in 2018 than any other billionaire (AMZN, MSFT, FB)

Jeff Bezos

  • Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, was the only person in the world in 2018 to amass a net worth that topped $100 billion.
  • According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, Bezos has a net worth of $123 billion, which is $24 billion more than his reported wealth at the end of 2017.
  • Bezos is the founder of Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin, as well as the owner of the Washington Post.

In a year when the biggest names in tech were embroiled in scandal, 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 his billionaire peers.

Jeff Bezos already claimed the title as the world's richest person at the beginning of the year, and unseated Microsoft founder Bill Gates from his 24-year streak at the top of Forbes' rankings of 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 in Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

Bezos finishes off the year with a net worth of $123 billion, the only person on the list to have a 12-digit net worth. Yet this 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 just a single hour. With that wealth, spending $88,000 to him is similar to 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.

Read more: We did the math to calculate exactly how much money billionaires and celebrities like Jeff Bezos and Kylie Jenner make an hour

But while Bezos saw his worth rise, other billionaires didn't see the same success. Following 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 billionaire rankings. Zuckerberg's net worth took an almost $20 billion hit this year, and is now pegged at a cool $52.9 billion.

Rounding out the top five billionaires, according to Bloomberg's rankings, are Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($90 billion), investor Warren Buffet ($82.9 billion), LVMH's CEO Bernard Arnault ($67.3 billion), and Spanish fashion executive Amancio Ortega ($58.7 billion).

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