We’re peanuts to Jeff Bezos
We’re just microscopic fingernail dust flakes. (Photo: Mona Chalabi on Twitter)
As of 2022, Forbes reports that there are almost 3,000 billionaires in the world. That’s 19 times as many as there were in 1987, when Forbes first began tracking the subject. Adjusting for inflation, the billionaires today are also 1,600% richer than they were in 1987.
It’s hard for regular people like you and me to imagine what that means and exactly how wealthy these people are, so let’s try to put it into perspective.
Hard data on the true wealth of the world’s most obscenely wealthy people is hard to come by. Billionaires have gotten so good at hiding their wealth that it’s difficult to tell how many of them there even are today. Using the scant data that is available, data journalist Mona Chalabi broke down the numbers and, in a piece for the New York Times, presented an unnerving visualization of just how small we regular people are next to someone like Jeff Bezos.
Bezos: a case study on the obscenely wealthy
With a net worth of $171 billion, Bezos was No. 1 on the Forbes billionaires list from 2017 to 2021, only overtaken in the past month by entrepreneur Elon Musk. So what can he do with $171 billion?
To start, a $2 billion charity donation from 2018 only accounted for 1.2% of his wealth at the time. And it’s no secret that Amazon employees are grossly underpaid and overworked, making only $37,930 a year. Chalabi points out that to make as much money as their CEO, an Amazon employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene Epoch (about 4.5 million years ago).
Chalabi goes further, comparing the median US household net worth ($118,200) to Bezos’ net worth ($172,000,000,000). Alongside some striking visualizations, Chalabi makes the following comparisons of the median wealth vs. Bezos’ wealth: the weight of a single peanut vs. a truckload of peanut butter, the size of a white blood cell vs. the length of a finback whale, a flake of fingernail dust vs. a 5 foot 7 tall man, and many others.
The most upsetting thing is that people like Bezos only get richer and richer and richer and richer, with virtually nothing stopping them. In October 2021, Business Insider reported that Bezos earns about $2,537 per second. That’s more than half of an average American full-time worker’s monthly salary – in a single second.
As men like Bezos become wealthier, the problems of inequality become bigger, impacting the lives of the poorest among us and the environment. But it’s all just peanuts to them, right?
