I was lying awake this past week with an odd question. Money feels different depending on how much you make. If I make $100/day, for example, a $50 lunch (don’t ask me where you’re picking up a $50 lunch, but bear with me) feels very expensive. If I make $1,000 a day, a $50 lunch feels more trivial.
In real terms, when I was a financially struggling student, I sometimes worried that a Starbucks coffee might jeopardize my rent. Now, I’m happy to pay for my friends when we go and don’t think twice. (Yes, I just equated being able to buy a Starbucks coffee for my friends as “riches”).
So, my question is what would living a normal life feel like to someone like Jeff Bezos. If Bezos was dropped into my life or yours, with all of his money, I want to know what our expenses would feel like to him.
My question: If Bezos was dropped into my life or yours, with all of his money, what would our expenses would feel like to him.
As we’re most familiar with our own net worth as a relative starting place, and the feeling of “expensive” is relative, we’re going to deflate all of our current expenses until they are proportionate to what they would be relative to Bezos’ net worth. To do this, we need a deflation factor for our expenses.
To do this, we need two numbers: i) Bezos net worth and, ii) the median household net worth (the average household net worth is higher and inflated due to people like Bezos, so it’s not really a good indicator of net worth of average families). Bezos’ net worth is approximately $180,000,000,000. The household net worth is approximately $160,000.
At this point, I originally pulled out my trusty iPhone calculator only to discover that it doesn’t enable you to type in $180B, with nine zeros after it. So I turned to Google Sheets to make this easier. To get what I’m calling the “Bezos Deflator,” you take Bezos’ net worth and divide by the median household net worth. This leaves you with how many times more Bezos is worth than the median household. Bezos has 1,071,960.30 times more money than the average American household.
To make this interesting, I’ve decided to model what an average monthly expenditure of an individual might feel like to Bezos. I approximated the household expenses and then divided by the Bezos Deflator so that the expense is relative to Bezos’ net worth. The result below is staggering. An average household budget for Bezos’ wouldn’t even crack what it feels like most of us to lose a penny.
| Item | Expense in Real $ | Expense with Bezos Deflator |
| Rent | -1800 | -$0.00168 |
| Car | -$350.00 | -$0.00033 |
| Car Insurance | -$100.00 | -$0.00009 |
| Gas | -$80.00 | -$0.00007 |
| Spotify | -$15.00 | -$0.00001 |
| Audible | -$14.95 | -$0.00001 |
| Online Storage | -$15.00 | -$0.00001 |
| hair cuts | -$70.00 | -$0.00007 |
| Hydro | -83.09 | -$0.00008 |
| House Insurance | -50 | -$0.00005 |
| Cell phone | -85 | -$0.00008 |
| Netflix | -14 | -$0.00001 |
| Clothing | -200 | -$0.00019 |
| Dining out | -300 | -$0.00028 |
| Gym membership | -175 | -$0.00016 |
| MISC | -100 | -$0.00009 |
| Total | -$3,452.04 | -$0.00322 |
Rent in this scenario is sixteen hundredth of a penny – a very reasonable price to pay for a roof over our head. Bezos’ own Audible is equal to one thousandth of a penny, while a standard purchase of Amazon Prime would equal no more than about seven thousandths of a penny.
At this level, while Bezos’ undoubtedly does not live this way, everything in our day to day life could become completely disposable: our clothes, our cell phone, even a car ($35,000 car = ~$0.03 or three cents).
Let’s look at this another way. I’m sure we’ve all given money to someone asking for it on the street. Sometimes we might give $5. Other times, we may only have $1. Let’s say we give them $3 on average. Now, let’s find the Bezos equivalent. By reversing the Bezos Deflator and inflate our giving instead. This looks something like this:
$3 x 1,071,960.30 = $3,215,880.90
Yes, you read that right: our giving of $3 is equivalent to Bezos giving away $3.2M. Perhaps we should all start asking for money on his street.
It is safe to say that, for practical purposes, money is virtually meaningless to Bezos and feels irrelevant. For political purposes, it’s likely everything. His wealth affords him opportunities to influence society in ways that even very few political actors can. Time will tell us how.
In the meantime, I can sleep easier knowing that I have the answer to my burning question, while Amazon’s Alexa lulls me to sleep.
“Alexa, goodnight”
