What Could Jeff Bezos Do With His Money? [Visualized!]

Many people are wondering what Jeff Bezos could do with his money, considering many of the injustices that are going on around the world.

This informative article explores this question and is current as of November 2020. We will do our best to continually update this information, but it is heavily dependent on how the Amazon stock ($AMZN) is doing.

In order to get a better idea of what Jeff Bezos can do with his money, at the time that you’re reading this, you should start by look up the $AMZN stock price.

Because of Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott’s divorce, part ownership in the company has been given to MacKenzie, leaving Bezos with a smaller ownership in the company.

Jeff Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon, and it makes up more than 90% of his total net worth.

For the purposes of this article, we will be assuming that Jeff Bezos’ wealth is going to be converted fully into cold, hard cash.

Unless Jeff Bezos liquidates his entire portfolio (he is at least a partial owner in more than 20 different companies), then his ability to do anything is heavily affected.

So, if Jeff Bezos liquidated his entire portfolio, as of November 2020, he’d have about $184B to use for various projects.

So, how far would $184B take him with a variety of humanitarian projects, or just interesting projects to think about? We’re about to find out.

Could Jeff Bezos Solve World Hunger?

Contrary to popular opinion, Jeff Bezos could not solve world hunger by himself. According to The Guardian, solving world hunger would cost about $33B/year, from 2020 until 2030, which has a grand total of $330B.

With Jeff Bezos’ net worth (which, again, we are making the assumption that it is liquidated) of $184B, he could not cover the entire bill himself. Jeff would be able to fund about 55.8% of the total costs upfront. Alternatively, he would be able to cover the first 5 and a half years’ costs of this 10 year-project.

This $330B would be partially used to develop agricultural advancements in underdeveloped countries across the country, which is where the bulk of malnourishment is found.

Even if Bezos would liquidate and give away 100% of the fortune he has amassed, he could not solve world hunger all by himself. However, he could absolutely make a world of a difference in a few select countries such as Haiti, Madagascar, and Chad, some of the countries with the highest levels of malnourishment in the world.

Could Jeff Bezos Solve Climate Change?

Jeff Bezos could not solve climate change by himself. With a price tag of ~$50 trillion to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of stopping global warming by 2050 through reducing global emissions, Jeff Bezos cannot afford this on his own.

With Jeff Bezos’ entire net worth liquidated, he could shoulder about 0.3% of what it will take to halt global warming, as visualized by this chart.

In fact, even if the entire company of Amazon was liquidated into cash, which includes liquidating thousands of individual investors’ stake in Amazon, it would only cover a little over 3% of this cost.

Could Jeff Bezos Buy a Country?

In theory, Jeff Bezos could buy many countries. With his net worth of $184B, Bezos is worth more than the GDP of 138 countries in total, including Iraq, Slovakia, and Ukraine, among many others.

This chart aims to visualize Jeff Bezos’ net worth in comparison to several countries’ GDP. As we stated, there are a total of 138 countries with GDP’s lower than Bezos’ net worth, and we only included a handful of them on this chart.

Although Bezos could buy a country, or even multiple countries if it were possible, it is not. Countries do not have “owners” in the typical sense, but if they did, then Bezos could buy a country.

Buying an island is entirely possible, which Bezos could afford to buy many of, and very large ones at that.

Could Jeff Bezos Make Everyone a Millionaire?

Jeff Bezos could not make everyone a millionaire, with “everyone” meaning everyone in the world. Jeff Bezos couldn’t even make everyone in 1 state a millionaire.

There is an easier way to think of this question, using math.

Jeff Bezos is worth $184B, which is the same as 184,000 x 1 million.

So Jeff Bezos could, in theory, make 184,000 people millionaires. To put it into perspective, Wyoming has a population of 578.6k people, which is the lowest population of the 50 US states.

So, Jeff Bezos could make about 31.8% of the smallest US state by population, Wyoming, millionaires.

This means that Jeff Bezos could make 0.056% of the US population, or 1 in 1,783 people in America, millionaires.

To Sum it All Up

Although Jeff Bezos has amassed an incredible fortune over his 56 years of age, many people overestimate his wealth in regards to what he could single-handedly do.

Jeff Bezos has the power to do a lot of good in this world, and many people are arguing that he does not do enough (and even that he is a large contributor to evil in the world).

We will leave that up to you to decide, but we hope that this article has given you a good visualization of what Jeff Bezos could do with his money if he ever decided to.

It’s important to keep in mind that performing the above actions would require that he liquidated 100% of his position in Amazon, which is his baby. This, understandably, would be an incredibly difficult thing for him to do.