American billionaire Jeff Bezos has been summoned by the governor of a Brazilian state to pay for using the name “Amazon” for the online shopping giant he founded, Business Insider reports.

Jeff BezosPhoto: Tony Gutierrez/AP/Profimedia

“Amazon uses the name Amazonas, uses the name Amazonia. How much do we get for it? We want to know,” Wilson Lima, governor of Amazonas state, told O Globo newspaper.

Lima is one of the Brazilian officials participating in the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. The Brazilian governor also said that by the end of the summit, scheduled for December 12, “we will hold a meeting with the large company Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, with the aim of establishing a partnership.”

“We don’t want fees and we don’t want handouts. We want a partnership. If we can’t partner with a large company named after our state and our largest river, who are we going to partner with? These guys really care about making a profit, they have something to give back to our population,” he added.

As Business Insider points out, the Brazilian politician posted a separate message on his Instagram account in the form of a video from the perspective of the Amazon forest:

“You deliver millions of products and have the largest logistics park in the world. And I? I clean the air for the whole planet and have the most biodiversity and equatorial forest. If your company is the most valuable of all, I’d say I’m priceless,” says the narrator of the recording.

“And since you are using my name and I got nothing out of it, I invite you to come here and learn more,” the message reads, among other things.

Check out this Instagram post

A post shared by Wilson Lima (@wilsonlimaam)

Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world

But the report also contains a factual error, Amazon is not the most valuable American company in terms of capitalization on the New York Stock Exchange. That honor goes to Apple, whose market capitalization recently climbed back above $3 trillion as the stock prices of major US technology companies rebounded after a disappointing third quarter.

With a market value of about $1.517 trillion, Amazon is the fourth most valuable American company behind Apple, Microsoft ($2.76 trillion) and Alphabet’s Google ($1.625 trillion).

Thus, the e-commerce giant founded by Jeff Bezos surpassed Nvidia ($1.15 trillion), Meta ($821.96 billion), Berkshire Hathaway ($776.75 billion), Tesla ($758.87 billion), Eli Lilly ($558, 33 billion) and Visa ($522.45 billion) in the rating. rating of the 10 most expensive American companies.

According to Bloomberg estimates, the recent increase in the price of Amazon shares has led to an increase in the personal fortune of Jeff Bezos to 171 billion dollars, returning him to the second place on the list of the richest people on the planet, ahead of the Frenchman Bernard Arnault. the founder of the luxury giant LVMH, which has a fortune of about $169 billion.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as the owner of Twitter and the neuroscience research company Neuralink, with a fortune of 222 billion dollars, leads the ranking.