Wealth and Late Oligocene Epoch

How Long Would It Take to Earn Jeff Bezos's Wealth?

Jeff Bezos is worth approximately $277 billion. That number is so massive it's hard even to comprehend, so I decided to break it down.

Let’s say you’re one of the average Amazon employees making about $74,619 a year. At that salary, it would take you roughly 3.71 million years to reach Bezos’s net worth.

Now imagine you're a warehouse worker making closer to $11,000 a year — a wage that many seasonal or part-time employees report. At that rate, you’d need over 25 million years to earn what Jeff Bezos currently has.

Yes, 25 million years.

The numbers I’m using come from a quick Google search — the current estimates for Bezos’s net worth and average Amazon wages. They may not be precise to the dollar, but when you're dealing with timeframes in the millions of years, even a few thousand dollars in either direction doesn’t change the point.

To put this in perspective:

• 3.7 million years ago, early human ancestors like Australopithecus were just learning to walk upright.

• 25 million years ago, humans didn’t exist. Even apes were just beginning to evolve.

• That’s before sabertooth cats, before the Ice Age, before the first Homo species.

You’d have to start working before the dawn of humanity to catch up.

This isn’t just about wealth. It’s about scale and how difficult it's to comprehend modern inequality. You know it is there, but the scale of wealth inequality is beyond our minds' capability to fully comprehend. When one person has amassed more than you could earn in millions of lifetimes — even if you started before the dinosaurs went extinct — it raises real questions about how our systems work and who they’re working for.