Eric Yuan (51), the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc., transferred 18 million shares of his firm valued at about $6 billion to an undisclosed recipient, based on Friday’s closing price, last week, Bloomberg reports.

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The Wall Street Journal reported about the share transfer earlier on Monday. The filings didn’t specify the recipient of the stock, owned by a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT), of which Yuan is a trustee. In other words, Yuan transferred about 40 percent of his stake in the company to unspecified beneficiaries.

In a statement, a spokesperson from Zoom said that these distributions were consistent with the Yuans’ “typical estate planning practices”.

Now, Yuan joins the world’s mega-rich who’ve been transferring stocks recently. Last month, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing gave some of his Zoom holdings to his businessman son Richard. The world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, has been donating shares of Amazon in support of a $10 billion pledge made last year to combat climate change.

Yuan became one of the world’s wealthiest people as demand for Zoom’s main product skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its stock surged almost 400 percent last year but has dipped 7.8 per cent in 2021.

Zoom was the best-performing cloud stock last year. The cloud stocks, in general, performed well last year as workers and students were forced to rely on digital tools in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yuan is now the world’s 130th-richest person with a pre-transfer net worth of $15.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It is a $9.2 billion increase since last March.

Li’s Zoom stake now represents almost one-fifth of his net worth.

Born in China, Yuan was refused a United States visa eight times before finally prevailing and moving to Silicon Valley. Yuan was an early employee of Zoom’s rival videoconferencing group WebEx Communications. In 2011, Yuan founded Zoom. It is said that the inspiration behind Zoom was in part the challenges of maintaining a long-distance relationship when he was in college.