Amazon's Jeff Bezos is worth $100 billion after Black Friday

(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos saw his net worth top $100 billion after Amazon stock, of which Bezos is the single largest owner, climbed 2.5 percent on Black Friday. The bump earned Bezos $2.4 billion on Friday alone.

Microsoft's Bill Gates was the first person to reach $100 billion in 1999. By Bloomberg's count, Bezos is the richest person in the world and the only individual to currently boast a 12-figure fortune, as Gates, in second place, now has a mere $89 billion to his name.

Bezos' gain is part of a larger story of how online shopping continues to eat up market share. Shoppers dropped $640 million online Friday by 10 a.m. Eastern, an 18 percent increase over Black Friday 2016. Investment banking firm Jefferies found only only 13 percent of customers said they'd be spending more on Black Friday this year, compared to 17 percent last year, indicating that more people are shopping online throughout the month than on just one day.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.