Even Jeff Bezos’s Daily Income Is a Nine-Figure Amount

Between Forbes’s 2020 and 2021 billionaire rankings, Jeff Bezos’s net worth went from $113 billion to $177 billion, meaning his fortune increased by $64 billion over a year.

That means that the Amazon founder’s daily income was about $175 million ($64 billion divided by 365). It also means his weekly income was about $1.23 billion and his hourly income was about $7.31 million. He earned an average of about $121,000 per minute, or about $2,029 per second, or just over $2 per millisecond.

Consider this: fruit flies beat their wings every 5 milliseconds, or 200 times a second. Therefore, on average, over a year, it took Bezos about the same time to earn $10 that it took a fruit fly to beat its wings once.

According to a report from the IPS (Institute for Policy Studies), billionaires in the United States got 62 percent richer since the COVID-19 crisis started in the country, adding $1.8 trillion to their collective wealth. Along the way, the number of billionaires in the country rose from 614 to 708.

“The great good fortune of these billionaires over the past 17 months is all the more appalling when contrasted with the devastating impact of coronavirus on working people,” IPS scholar Chuck Collins wrote. “Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 625,000 have died from it.”

And as Business Insider points out, the billionaires’ $1.8-trillion gain is enough money to pay off the total outstanding student loan debt in America—currently estimated to be $1.7 trillion—with billions to spare.

In an Aug. 26 post for the IPS’s Blogging the Great Divide, Bob Lord reported that just seven individuals—all white men, and “a group small enough to squeeze inside a single SUV”—had a collective net worth of $1 trillion. Those seven men were Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

As Lord pointed out, the combined wealth of that “trillion-dollar seven” could pay for nearly a third of the $3.5-trillion budget package under consideration in Congress, one that would expand funding for housing, healthcare, education, and environmental efforts. “Put another way, the cost of what some are vilifying as ‘unaffordable’ social spending for a nation of 330 million turns out to be barely three times the wealth held by just 0.0000022 percent of our U.S. population,” Lord added.

The IPS missives came shortly after a ProPublica analysis found that the “true tax rate” for the United States’ 25 wealthiest people from 2014 to 2018 was only 3.4 percent.

Bezos paid $973 million in total taxes against an income total of $4.22 billion and a wealth growth of $99 billion, making his “true tax rate” 0.98 percent, according to ProPublica. While typical Americans paid $106 in taxes for every $100 of wealth growth between 2006 and 2018, Bezos paid only $1.09, the site added.