Jeff Bezos Made $6.2 Billion in 5 Minutes and Became the World’s Richest Person (How Was Your Thursday?)

Imagine you’re good friends with Jeff Bezos, and you had a great day, and you can’t wait to tell him about it. So you email Jeff Bezos at Amazon to share the details, and then you ask him, politely: “Enough about me, Jeff–how was your day?”

Jeff doesn’t want to upstage you, but he can’t help it, if he’s being truthful:

“Not bad,” he’ll say. “I made more than $6 billion in five minutes.”

This is no joke. Amazon’s stock jumped 7.1 percent yesterday afternoon, on the news of its amazing third-quarter earnings report. At 4 p.m., as the market closed, it was trading at $972 a share; five minutes later in after hours trading, it popped to $1,041.15. 

And since Bezos still owns about 17 percent of Amazon’s common stock, if you do the math: boom, $6.24 billion. It means Bezos’s total net worth is now about $83.5 billion, and should return him to the top spot on the list of the world’s richest people.

The Amazon CEO wasn’t the only master of the universe to see a giant leap Thursday. Larry Page and Sergei Brin picked up $1.2 billion and $1.15 billion each, after Alphabet’s stock surged on an earnings report. And Bill Gates is worth an extra $340 million based on Microsoft’s jump.

But seriously, your friend Jeff Bezos’s increase? It’s insane. I don’t begrudge him; Amazon is an amazing company, but just how much is $6.24 billion?

• It’s enough to buy lunch for literally every single person in the United States (at about $19 each, mind you).
• It’s almost exactly twice President Trump’s entire net worth, according to Forbes.
• It’s just a bit less than the entire gross domestic product of the country of Kyrgyzstan. 

Here’s another visualization. Some people on Reddit spent a long time figuring out exactly how much cash you could stuff into a standard briefcase like you see in the movies. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll round it off to $1 million.

So imagine that for some implausible reason that Bezos decided to take his five-minute earnings, convert them to cash, and store it all in 6,240 briefcases. They’d weigh more than 68 tons together, and if we imagine that this dollar sign ($) represents a single briefcase, here’s what they’d look like lined up next to one another:

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Not a bad haul. So how was your Thursday in comparison? Let us (and Bezos) know in the comments.