What Could You Buy with $44,000,000 per hour?

What Could You Buy with $44,000,000 per hour?

This year Jeff Bezos has seen a significant rise in his net worth due to the rising stock price of Amazon in which most of his wealth is linked to. At the beginning of the year his net worth was estimated at $99 Billion and currently stands at about $160 Billion. We have seen many attempts to break down this tremendous growth into more tangible figures. Most of which assume he worked every second of the year thus far – maybe he has. But for most of us an 8-hour day, 5 days a week is more reasonable. If Mr. Bezos put in the same schedule his earnings would equate to approximated $44 Million per hour. Since most of us cannot fathom that type of wealth in our life times let alone in a single hour of work, we thought it would be interesting to see how long it would take Jeff Bezos to earn enough for certain things. These calculations assume continued earnings of $44 Million and the typical 2,080 working hours per year.

 

 

Prime for All – Approximately $38.76 Billion

As a happy birthday to everyone, Jeff Bezos could front every American’s Prime membership at $119/year. In fact, he could do much more because that would only be slightly over 40% of his annual rate. So, he could also throw in another $162 a person just to be nice.

 

 

Rebuild Puerto Rico – Approximately $139 Billion

Puerto Rico submitted a report to Congress recently estimating it will cost $139 Billion to fully recover from Hurricane Maria. For most people that is an insane amount of money, except for Jeff. For him, that’s only about 1.5 years. Maybe they would even change the name to Puerto Jeff – then again, we already have a Port Jeff in Long Island.

 

 

Expensive Digs – Approximately $50.7 Billion
A few years ago, MSN Money estimated the costs of some of the most iconic historic buildings. One of the most known and nearly highest prices on the list was the Palace of Versailles. They estimated the cost today is $50.7 Billion. Mr. Bezos could work up the 20% down payment ($10 Billion) in just under 6 weeks of work and pay the whole thing in cash in just over half a year’s work. He might have to pay cash because it will be hard to find a bank to finance that purchase. To put that in perspective, based on median income publish by Gallup and median home prices published by the National Association of Realtors, it would take the median American over 45 weeks to save up for a down payment and over 4 years to cover the entire amount (that’s their whole paycheck being saved before taxes).

 


Expensive Airplanes – Approximately $737 Million

The world’s most expensive airplane is the B-2 Spirit otherwise known as the Stealth Bomber. The price tag is a whopping $737 Million paid to Northrop Grumman. Bezos is experimenting with space travel and drones delivering packages so this might be right up his alley. Bezos can buy 2 of these per work week.

 

 

Another Company – Approximately $91 Billion
Based on the $44 Million per working hour, Jeff Bezos is on track to earn over $91 Billion this year. With that type of income he could consider completely purchasing nearly any S&P 500 company. Only about 63 of the current S&P 500 companies are greater. The largest he could purchase is American Express. He could also diversify and buy all of the bottom 20. Some of the names in that list currently include, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Foot Locker, H&R Block, Mattel, Urban Outfitters, and Navient. So you could get your tires, shows, taxes, toys, clothes and student loans all from Amazon.

 

 

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – Approximately $1.6 Trillion
GDP is the market value of all goods and services from a nation in a year. As of 2017, 16 countries have a GDP of more than a Trillion Dollars per year. Canada’s, number 10, GDP was estimated at $1.6 Trillion in 2017 by the International Monetary Fund. Jeff Bezos would have to work 18 years to earn the same as all of Canada did last year. Pretty amazing considering there are over 36 million Canadian residents.

 

 

The Federal Deficit – Approximately $15.7 Trillion
This one might be more of an exercise of how large our deficit really is. If Jeff Bezos made it his mission to pay all our Country’s past debt (and assuming we stopped running a deficit moving forward) it would take him about 171 years.

 

 

 

Disclosures:
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance reference is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested directly.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is a capitalization-weighted index of 500 stocks designed to measure performance of the broad domestic economy through changes in the aggregate market value of 500 stocks representing all major industries.