Mark Zuckerberg is world's fifth richest person

Following Facebook's second quarter earnings report that showed the company's stocks hit record high, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has achieved a personal milestone too: becoming the world's fifth richest person.

According to a report in Fortune on Thursday, Zuckerberg's net worth hit $72.7 billion on Thursday. This increase of more than $3 billion sent him past Mexico's Carlos Slim to become the world's fifth-richest man.

"Zuckerberg's wealth is largely tied up in Facebook stock, meaning it rises and falls along with the company's shares," the report noted.

The social networking giant has been showing positive results since the beginning of 2017. Its shares have risen more than 50 percent and reached two billion monthly users across the globe.

According to Forbes' real-time rankings of the world's billionaires, Amazon's Jeff Bezos overtook Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world.

Bezos, who is also Chairman and Chief Executive of the Seattle-based company, was worth almost $91 billion after Amazon's share price rose more than one per cent in morning trading in New York, the Independent reported.

That has put his fortune ahead of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's. The latter has a net worth of around $90.7 billion and has been at the top of Bloomberg's rich list since 2013.

However, by the end of regular trading, Bezos had slipped back to second place, behind Gates.

Bezos’s stake was valued at $178m when Amazon began trading publicly on May 15, 1997 and he’s added about 400 per cent to his net worth since he joined the Bloomberg index in April 2012.

At the time, Bezos was ranked No 35 with $18bn. He more than doubled his wealth in 2015 and has added almost $40 billion to his fortune since then. That the two companies’ public-facing founders are now sparring for the world’s richest title — just as their respective corporations are battling for control of the cloud — is rather fitting.