Things Jeff Bezos Could Do With His Money (if they were possible)

3 min readJul 24, 2020

Trying to Make 188.2 Billion Slightly More Comprehensible

According to a recent Forbes article, Jeff Bezos's personal net worth reached as high as $188.2 billion as of July 9, 2020. Now, Amazon stock took a little bit of hit today so it’s probably down from that number. However, I wanted to take a look at how big this number actually is because it is impossible for most people to actually comprehend $188,200,000,000. So here goes:

If Bezos was able to liquidate his entire fortune today for the full value, he could cut a check to every person in the U.S. for $572.04 (assuming a current population of 329 million people). Or if he really wanted to flex he could send every person on Earth $24.44 (extrapolating a 7.7 billion population based on 2018 data).
If he decided he wanted to liquidate everything in exchange for physical currency he could singlehandedly remove 15.7% of all U.S. currency currently in circulation. (188.2 billion of the 1.2 trillion dollars)
If he wanted all of his money in gold it would be 6,226,840 pounds or to get rid of another large number 3,113 tons of gold. (As I write this gold is currently $1,889 per ounce. There is 16 oz in a pound so one pound of gold has a value of $30,224. 188.2 billion divided by 30,224 equals 6,226,839.6)
Based on that last number he could afford to give every person in the city limits of Los Angeles (4.05 million) and San Diego (1.45 million) a pound of gold and still have 715,224 pounds left to give to all of the roughly 713,000 citizens of Washington, D.C.
And the amount of the gold he would have left at the end of the last scenario would still equal more than $67 million.
Using the median home price for my city, Phoenix, AZ, he could purchase nearly 700,000 homes (188.2 billion/269,175).
In my home state, North Dakota, he could buy 792,000 homes at their median home price of $237,454. That would be enough for all 762,000 North Dakotans plus 30,000 leftovers for odds and ends.
A moderately-priced home is nice for the average person but what if he wants to buy something luxurious like say a Boeing 747–8 which could accommodate up to 700 people? Bezos could afford…