How does Jeff Bezos’ hourly rate compare to yours?
Calculations reveal how much money the world’s richest man makes in a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour, a minute, and a second
On Tuesday, Amazon announced plans to increase the company’s minimum wage in the US to US$15 – more than twice the federal minimum wage of US$7.25.
Currently, the median annual worker pay at Amazon is US$28,466.
But neither Amazon’s minimum wage increase nor the median annual worker pay is close to how much Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – the world’s richest man, according to Forbes – makes.
We calculated the CEO’s annual earnings by finding the difference between Bezos’ 2017 and 2018 net worths (calculated in October of each year) as provided by the Forbes 400 list. But what does that translate to per month, or even per second? From his annual earnings, which we determined to be US$78.5 billion, we then calculated how much Bezos earns in smaller time frames.
Business Insider previously calculated Bezos’ annual and hourly earnings using Forbes’ annual billionaire’s list, published every March, but we’ve updated these calculations using the latest Forbes 400 list, published on October 3.
This estimation of Bezos’ wages are being used for the sake of comparison. A large portion of his wealth is tied to Amazon stock, which can increase or decrease in value at any given time.
At the annual earnings rate Business Insider calculated – again, an estimation based on the change in his Forbes net worth year-over-year – Bezos has earned US$6.54 billion a month, more than US$1.5 billion a week, and more than US$215 million a day in the last 12 months.
