A TikTok user recreated Jeff Bezos’ net worth in grains of rice, and not even the hungriest of humans could make their way through the ridiculously large pile.
Okay, so we all know Amazon is huge. It allows you to have pretty much any object delivered to your door within days, and in recent years it’s branched out with Amazon Prime to include online streaming and more.
With that in mind, it’s obvious the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is doing pretty well in life. He currently has a net worth of more than $121 billion – though as most of us will never see even a small percentage of that wealth, it’s extremely hard to comprehend.
TikTok user and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Humphrey Yang decided to make the scale of Bezos’ wealth more relatable to the average person by using grains of rice to represent money, and the result is, frankly, obscene.
In the video, Yang explained he had previously used rice to demonstrate the huge difference between $1 million and $1 billion by counting out 10,000 grains of rice, each of which represented $100,000.
Viewers then asked Yang how much Bezos had in terms of rice, so the TikTok user hit the supermarket to buy a digital scale before getting to work.
Check out the result here:
Yang weighed out a pile of rice representing $1 billion, then did the maths to calculate how much rice he would need to represent roughly $122 billion. Yang then headed to Costco to stock up on a couple of huge bags of rice, because bulk buying was the only way he could get his hands on the amount needed to represent Bezos’ enormous wealth.
Yang spread a blue tarpaulin on the floor of his home and poured out the giant bags before panning the camera across to indicate the difference between $100,000 and Bezos’ near $122 billion. Needless to say, the TikTok video makes $100,000 look like a depressingly small amount.
All in all, Yang required 58lbs (26.3kg) of rice to complete his experiment, and the resulting pile could barely even fit in the camera frame.
The entrepreneur then used rice to compare the worth of Bezos’ new $165 million house to his total worth – a comparison which made Yang literally laugh out loud, as Bezos probably wouldn’t even realise the $165 million had gone.
The CEO’s worth is ridiculous enough when put into grains of rice – just imagine if it was piles of actual cash.
Yang assured his followers the rice used in the experiment would be taken by his family to ensure none of it goes to waste – though I imagine his loved ones would rather split $122 billion between them.
If only Bezos was as willing to share.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.