Jeff Bezos is rich as hell, but if you have trouble understanding just how obscenely wealthy the Amazon founder is, we suggest you visit TikTok.
Entrepreneur and TikTok star Humphrey Yang, a 32-year-old eCommerce consultant and freelancer from Silicon Valley, recently created a striking visual representation of Jeff Bezos’ net worth using grains of rice.
To carry out his project, Yang decided to pretend a single grain of rice represented $100,000. He then counted out 10 grains of rice to show $1 million, and proceeded to measure out $1 billion by counting out a whopping 10,000 grains of rice by hand.
After Yang’s first rice TikTok went viral on Twitter, he decided to make a second video that specifically showcased Bezos’ net worth in terms of rice.
In “Rice. Part Two,” Yang goes to Target to buy a digital food scale, weighs the $1 billion pile of rice, and does some serious math. He then takes a trip to Costco to buy two more giant bags of rice, and gets measuring.
“Once I had that 10,000 grains of rice counted out I knew how much it weighed,” Yang told Mashable in an email. “Then [I] multiplied it out to figure that Jeff Bezos’ approximate net worth was around 58 pounds of rice.”
While Yang measured $122 billion in rice, Bezos’ net worth is reportedly at $114 billion today. Either way, it’s an absolutely massive amount of money, and it translates to an absolutely massive amount of rice.
Bezos’ rice pile was so big that Yang was actually able to shove a keyboard into it for scale. He was also sure to subtract the new home Bezos recently purchased from the rice pile, and it should come as no shock that removing a few grains barely made a dent.
Yang, who started using TikTok and YouTube at the end of 2019 because he “wanted to educate Gen-Z and young millennials on financial literacy,” often shares financial and business-related advice with his followers. He explained that originally he wanted to “figure out how to visualize $1 million vs $1 billion” because of a YouTube video he’d seen several years ago, and he is really happy with how his version turned out.
“The process was tedious, the cleanup was a mess, but the video was great! I am glad I got to tell a story, show viewers the scale of money, and hopefully educate them on how much a billion vs 100+ billion is,” he said.
And for those skeptical of Yang’s claim that he actually spent a Saturday night hand-counting grains of rice for this TikTok, here’s the video of the process from his YouTube channel.
That’s some serious dedication, and we’re thankful for this nice rice lesson.
