A day after Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, the business magnate got even richer.

The richest man in the world handed over the CEO reins to protege Andy Jassy on Monday. However, despite his decision, Bezos was still the company's largest shareholder at 11% compared to the next-largest shareholder in line, Vanguard Group, which only holds about 6.5% of the shares.

Bezos is now the executive chair of the company, but he will reportedly spend less time at the company that he built.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Pentagon announced it was canceling a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with Microsoft. The said contract was previously approved under the administration of former President Donald Trump, who is not a fan of Bezos.

According to Deadline, the project is now widely anticipated to go to Amazon, which is a leader in cloud computing. After the news, the stock of Amazon rose to 4.7%. As a result, Bezos' wealth rose as well, shooting up by $8.4 billion in just a day.

In the past four years, Bezos has been ranked by Forbes as the richest individual in the world. Based on the latest estimation of Forbes, Bezos has an estimated wealth of $177 billion at the opening of 2021. On Tuesday, Bezos' wealth grew to approximately $211 billion, Bloomberg reported.

Forbes considered the jump on Bezos' wealth a huge one, but they estimated the Amazon founder's wealth in 2020 and it grew by $64 billion. The increase in his wealth was because his business boomed during the pandemic.

Leaving Elon Musk in the Dust

Bezos' $211 net worth eclipses Elon Musk's brief $210 billion valuations in January of this year. Musk is currently worth $163 billion, Yahoo Finance reported.

Even MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos and the 15th-richest person in the world, saw her wealth jump on Tuesday. She has now a projected wealth of $2.9 billion eclipsing the $2.7 billion she's given away so far this year.

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Jeff Bezos Steps Down as Amazon's CEO

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as the CEO on Monday. Bezos handed over the reins of his founded company Andy Jassy, who ran Amazon's cloud-computing business. Jassy replaced Bezos, a change that the company initially announced in February.

Bezos' company navigated the challenges faced by the world, to emerge as one of the most successful companies despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Bezos, Amazon's biggest shareholder will still hold sway over the company he started out of his Seattle garage in 1995. Stepping down allowed the richest person in the world to fulfill his childhood dream of traveling to space. The 57-year-old business magnate would blast into space on July 20 when Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket makes its first flight with a crew. Bezos would be bringing his younger brother Mark, who is an investor and a volunteer firefighter.

Bezos would travel along with the rest of the crew more than 60 miles above the planet's surface into suborbital space.

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Written by Jess Smith

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