Bezos files $4.07 billion Amazon share sale as firm hits $3 trillion milestone
Jeff Bezos has filed to sell approximately 15 million Amazon shares worth $4.07 billion through Morgan Stanley, marking the second-largest single Form 144 filing of his career. The transaction follows Amazon’s achievement of a $3 trillion market capitalisation, supported by strong second-quarter earnings and a 37% surge in AWS revenue.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos filed a Form 144 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell roughly 15 million shares, valued at approximately $4.07 billion, through Morgan Stanley. The sale is executed under a Rule 10b5-1 pre-arranged trading plan adopted on November 14, 2025, ensuring the transaction was scheduled months before the company reached its latest valuation milestone. This filing represents Bezos’s second-largest single disposal by dollar value, trailing only a $5.4 billion sale filed on his wedding day in June 2025.
The transaction comes shortly after Amazon reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $200.61 billion, a 20% year-on-year increase that surpassed analyst estimates. The growth was largely propelled by Amazon Web Services, which posted revenue of $42.2 billion, a 37% surge that accounted for 61% of the company’s total operating profit. AWS operating income reached $16.6 billion, running at a 39.4% margin, as chief executive Andy Jassy cited sharp gains in sales and profitability driven by accelerating enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence workloads.
Combined with a previous programme to sell 25 million shares completed in late July 2025, Bezos’s total dispositions since mid-2025 amount to approximately $9.7 billion. While substantial, this figure remains below the $13.5 billion he sold across all of 2024, which was his personal annual record. Since 2002, Bezos has disposed of approximately $50 billion in Amazon stock through a series of pre-planned sales, with the scale of his selling growing in proportion to the company’s valuation milestones.
Amazon became the fifth company globally to reach a $3 trillion market capitalisation on August 3, 2026. The stock closed at a record $284.02 on the day the filing appeared, having risen 4.58% in a single session following the earnings beat. Although shares dropped more than 2% when markets opened on August 4 after the sale disclosure became public, retail sentiment shifted to "extremely bullish" on StockTwits, which recorded a 500% surge in message volume around the stock.
The company raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to approximately $220 billion, up from a previous estimate of $200 billion, signalling aggressive infrastructure investment. Analysts at Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and UBS have raised their price targets, with Bank of America analyst Justin Post noting that AI revenues now account for 15% of total cloud revenue. The market focus remains on the cloud division's margin expansion and AI-driven demand rather than the founder’s routine, pre-arranged liquidations.
