Black Friday sales made the CEO of Amazon the world’s richest man

Black Friday was very much in the black this year...

Years ago - and, it feels like, not even that many years ago - Black Friday was a fundamentally American thing, that we here in Europe never really understood. People literally going insane because of a sale? Calm down, ya looneys! Then in the last few years, it has spread this way, and it has become very clear that the insanity virus that is spread by the want of a good deal is quite contagious, as anyone who happened to be in a shopping centre a few days ago can testify to. This year's Black Friday was something of a record, however, especially when it came to online sales. According to Tech Crunch, folks hit up the web for the day ended up spending a combined $2.87 billion in the U.S. alone (compared to 2016's total of $1.93 billion). Business Insider is reporting that somewhere between 45% and 50% of the total sales were just on Amazon, which means that the company made well over $1 billion in just one day. That is really good news for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who happens to be a majority shareholder in the company. In March of this year, Forbes magazine had Bezos as the third richest person on the planet, behind Bill Gates ($86 billion) and Warren Buffett ($75.6 billion). However, off the back of this one day, the shares of Amazon had increased in price by nearly 3%, pushing Bezos up to the top of the rich list, with a new estimated wealth of $100 billion. Well for some...