Both the world's richest man and the world's second richest man are throwing money into space, which directly leads Bezos to open the cash-out mode.

Amazon.Com Inc sold about $2.5 billion worth of Amazon.Com Inc shares this week, according to regulatory filings filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 5.

This is the first large-scale cash out of Bezos this year after selling more than $10 billion worth of shares in 2020.

Cash out nearly 2.5 billion US dollars in two days

In total, Bezos plans to sell as many as 2 million shares, according to regulatory filings.

On Monday and Tuesday, Bezos has sold about 739000 Amazon.Com Inc shares, ranging from $3274 to $3485, according to a pre-arranged trading plan. After paying the relevant taxes, the two deals will bring $1.9 billion to Bezos.

This is Bezos's first large-scale sale of Amazon shares this year, but not the first large-scale sell-off in his history.

In the 15 years since Amazon.Com Inc went public in 1997, Bezos sold about 1/5 of the e-commerce giant for about $2 billion. The value of his stake in Amazon.Com Inc has soared in recent years. Now he can make billions of dollars by selling a relatively small number of shares.

It is worth noting that Bezos has accelerated the pace of share sales in recent years.

In 2020, Amazon.Com Inc's share price rose 76 per cent for the whole year because of the epidemic. Bezos sold Amazon.Com Inc shares worth more than $10 billion in three batches in February, August and November of this year.

Now, Bezos is doing it again.

But even if Mr Bezos sells his stake on a large scale, he is still by far the richest man in the world.

According to the Billionaires Index, Bezos currently has a net worth of about $191 billion. Nearly 52.5 million shares of Amazon.Com Inc (with a stake of more than 10 per cent) are the main source of wealth. Even if this cash loss related taxes and fees, Bezos is still "the richest man in the world".

The flow of funds is not clear.

At present, there is no final conclusion on the flow of funds after cash out.

The Amazon.Com Inc founder had previously said he would sell about $1 billion of Amazon.Com Inc shares a year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin.

It is not clear whether Mr Bezos's latest cash is aimed at increasing support for blue origins.

But Blue Origin continues to expand and announced on Wednesday that the company will send its first astronauts into space this summer.

Catch up with Musk's "Plan of Heaven"

In a letter to employees earlier this year, Bezos announced that he would step down as chief executive in the third quarter of this year and would shift his focus to other businesses, including Blue Origin, which is "having a good fight" with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Blue originated from a commercial space company founded by Bezos in 2000. The company launched the Blue Moon lunar lander in May 2019; in terms of satellite launch plans, Bezos announced in July 2020 that he would spend $10 billion on a satellite Internet network.

Compared with SpaceX, in the space battlefield, the research and development of Blue Origin is slow, and the operation and production ideas generally inherit the old state of traditional aerospace, which is far from SpaceX in terms of technology and commercial application. After Bezos resigned as CEO, the move to devote more energy to space exploration is expected to speed up Blue Origin's catch-up with SpaceX.