Jeff Bezos sells over $3.1 billion in Amazon shares

San Francisco: Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has sold over $3.1 billion worth of the company's shares this week, according to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Following tax deductions, the world's richest man will take home an estimated $2.4 billion, Forbes reported on Wednesday.

While the reason behind the current share sales is not known, Bezos had earlier said he would be selling $1 billion worth of Amazon shares every year to fund Blue Origin, his space exploration company.

According to the filings, the latest share sales, which bring the Amazon CEO's total cash out in 2020 to a little over $7.2 billion so far, were part of a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan, CNBC reported.

This is a quite a huge number compared to the $2.8 billion worth of shares sold by him in 2019.

The Amazon CEO still holds more than 54 million shares.

Amazon reported solid second quarter results last week, registering a 40 per cent increase in net sales to $88.9 billion, compared with $63.4 billion in the same period last year.

Bezos, along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, SundarPichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple, appeared in a US Congress panel hearing into their companies' anti-competition practices barely a week ago.