(NEXSTAR) – Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon — the $1.6 trillion company he founded in 1994 — in Q3 of 2021, the company announced Tuesday. But even without helming Amazon, Bezos has enough wealth to last him several lifetimes times over.
As of Tuesday afternoon, 57-year-old Bezos was worth a whopping $196.2 billion, according to Forbes.
With money like that in the bank, Bezos could spend nearly $11 million every day for the next fifty years — or until he turns 107.
Here’s what else he could do with his $196.2 billion:
- Bezos could give every Amazon employee — all 1.13 million of them — a $173,628 bonus.
- He could purchase 58,047,337.2781 shares of Amazon stock.
- Every single American could receive a $597 check.
- He could donate $25,764 to each resident of Washington State, where Amazon is headquartered.
- He could pay every person on Earth $25.
- Once a month for the next year, he could drop $16,350,000.
- Once a week for the next year, he could spend $3,762,736,633.
- If he spent $1 billion every single day for the next month, he’d still have $165 billion leftover.
In the fall, Bezos will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who runs Amazon’s cloud-computing business. Bezos will then become the company’s executive chair.
Amazon is one of the last of the biggest tech giants to have a founder as CEO. Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquished their executive positions in parent company Alphabet in 2019. Oracle’s Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO in 2014. Bill Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000, kept a day-to-day role at the company until 2008 and served as its chairman until 2014. Gates left the board entirely last year to focus on philanthropy.
In a blog post to employees, Bezos said he plans to focus on new products and early initiatives being developed at Amazon. And he said he’ll have more time for side projects: his space exploration company Blue Origin; the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post; and his charities.
Launched in 1994, Amazon was a pioneer of fast and free shipping that won over millions of shoppers who used the site to buy diapers, TVs and just about anything. Under Bezos, Amazon also launched the first e-reader that gained mass acceptance, and its Echo listening device made voice assistants a more common sight in many living rooms.
As a child, Bezos was intrigued by computers and interested in building things, such as alarms he rigged in his parents’ home. He got a degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University, and then worked at several Wall Street companies.
He quit his job at D.E. Shaw to start an online retail business — though at first he wasn’t sure what to sell. Bezos quickly determined that an online bookstore would resonate with consumers. He and his wife, MacKenzie, whom he met at D.E. Shaw and married in 1993, set out on a road trip to Seattle — a city chosen for its abundance of tech talent and proximity to a large book distributor in Roseburg, Oregon.
While MacKenzie drove, Bezos wrote up the business plan for what would become Amazon.com. Bezos convinced his parents and some friends to invest in the idea, and Amazon began operating out of the Bezos’ Seattle garage on July 16, 1995.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
