Jeff Bezos Sold $737 Million of Amazon Stock—Mostly on His Wedding Day
Jul 02, 2025 10:22:00 -0400 by Ed Lin | #Retail #Inside Scoop
A trading plan of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos just executed its first stock sale. (STEFANO RELLANDINI/AFP via Getty Images)
Jeff Bezos sold a lot less Amazon.com stock than he could have on his wedding day, but it still totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bezos, the founder and executive chair of the retail and cloud firm, sold 3,324,926 Amazon shares on June 27 and June 30—a Friday and a Monday—for $736.7 million, an average price of $221.56 each.
The bulk of the sales—$686.3 million—were on June 27, the day he and Lauren Sanchez Bezos were married. The transactions were conducted by Bezos’ trading plan, according to a form he filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He now owns 905.5 million Amazon shares in a personal account.
On May 1, Amazon disclosed in a regulatory form that Bezos had adopted on March 4 a so-called Rule 10b5-1 plan to sell up to 25 million shares through May 29, 2026.
Insiders use such plans to remove the appearance of bias from knowledge of nonpublic information. Plans automatically execute trades when preset conditions, including price, volume, and timing, are met.
The stock sales are the first through Bezos’ trading plan, and first this year.
Now, he has 21.7 million Amazon shares left to sell through the plan. Bezos had filed late in June, before the report of the stock sales, that he planned to sell 25 million shares, as soon as his wedding day. The shares were received as founder stock, years before Amazon went public in 1997.
Over the last 65 trading days, Amazon stock volume has averaged 50.4 million shares a day.
Inside Scoop is a regular Barron’s feature covering stock transactions by corporate executives and board members—so-called insiders—as well as large shareholders, politicians, and other prominent figures. Due to their insider status, these investors are required to disclose stock trades with the Securities and Exchange Commission or other regulatory groups.
Write to Ed Lin at ed.lin@barrons.com