Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos sold a new batch of 14 million shares of Amazon stock, worth about $2.4 billion. This brings Bezos’s total of Amazon shares he has sold this month to 50 million.
Bezos started selling off this latest installment of shares on Feb. 15 and continued up until Feb. 20, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
Before that, Bezos unloaded 12 million shares between Feb. 7 and Feb. 8, another 12 million between Feb. 9 and Feb. 12, and most recently another batch of 12 million between Feb. 13 and Feb. 14.
Over nine trading days, Bezos sold a total of 50 million shares, worth about $8.4 billion. The last time Bezos sold Amazon stock was in 2021.
Why now? It probably comes down to taxes
These transactions are part of a trading plan Bezos adopted in November to sell off about 50 million by Jan 31, 2025, an SEC filing disclosed.
The adoption of this plan coincided with Bezos’s announcement that month that he was moving from Seattle to Miami.
Bezos announced his move, in an Instagram post in November, saying he was moving back to the city where he attended high school, to be closer to his parents and the operations of his aerospace company, Blue Origin.
If he still lived in Washington state, where a 7% capital gains tax was enacted in 2022 and upheld in November, his recent transactions would have cost Bezos nearly $600 million.
Bezos didn’t mention Washington state’s new capital gains tax as a reason for his move. But the billionaire didn’t sell any Amazon stock in 2022 or 2023 while he was still living there and the new tax was enacted, Fortune reports. Last year, however, he donated about 1.6 million Amazon shares, worth about $240 million to non-profit organizations.