Amazon chief, Jeff Bezos sells 1% stake in Amazon for $671 mn

Jeff Bezos, the fourth-richest man on Forbes' list of the word's billionaires, sold a little over 1 million shares of Amazon. between Tuesday and Thursday this week, netting $671 million before taxes, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That sale amounted to about 1 per cent of his stake in the e-commerce company. He now owns 81.91 million shares of Amazon, just over 17 per cent of the firm.

The filing further stated that, Bezos also gave 3,141 shares to an undisclosed non-profit organisation. This amounted to a gift worth $2 million. He also gifted 741 Amazon shares, but no details were disclosed.

Amazon's share price had risen steadily since January 2015, boosting Bezos' net worth with the increase. Forbes  had calculated Bezos' net worth at $34.8 billion for its 2015 billionaires list.

The surge in Amazon's stock price had catapulted Bezos to the 10 richest in the world in the Forbes 2016 list of the World's Billionaires in March this year, with a net worth pegged at $45.2 billion.

Meanwhile, Bezos opened up for the first time about his vision for commercial space travel  in The Washington Post.

''I wanted to start a space company from when I was a little kid, but I never expected to have the resources to do so,'' Bezos explained. ''Then I won this lottery ticket called Amazon.com. And so when Amazon became a successful company, I realised, 'Hey, I can actually fulfill my childhood dreams of starting a space company,' and that's what I did.''

But the fascinating part of Bezos' vision of future humans travelling to space is not limited to tourism-oriented trips, but involves, at some point in the future, ''millions of people living and working in space.''