In a sale which we are confident will be defended as just "selling for tax purposes" or "considering charitable giving" and certainly not "an admission that Amazon is overpriced", Jeff Bezos took to the open market this week to dump a million shares of Amazon stock, worth just over $3 billion, company SEC filings revealed on Wednesday.

Bezos sold the majority of the shares between $3,106 and $3,167, decreasing the number of shares he beneficially owns from 55,488,700 to 54,488,700. The company's CEO of Amazon Web Services, Andrew R. Jassey, also sold 6,945 shares on August 3, 2020 at a price of $3,183, netting him about $2.2 million.

The latest sales comes after Bezos dumped $1.8 billion worth of stock back between January 31 and February 3.

Bloomberg calculated back in February that in the 15 years after Amazon went public, Bezos sold a fifth of the company for $2 billion. So in February, he sold shares equal to roughly one-hundredth of this stake for similar proceeds. Today, he sold about two-tenths of a percent of the company for 1.5x times the same proceeds.

The 54.5 million shares that Bezos still owns are worth about $174 billion. Other recent transactions by Bezos include the sale of $2 billion in 2017 and $2.8 billion in 2019.

Here is a look at Bezos' sales prior to today:

(Click on image to enlarge)

To account for this week's sale, just add another $3.1 billion to the 2020 total.