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Last week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that he was stepping down as CEO of the company, with former Amazon cloud chief Andy Jassy set to take over.

Anybody familiar with Bezos’ management style knows he won’t be stepping away completely, but the multi-multi-multi-billionaire is going to free up some time to pursue his other passions.

Those include The Day One Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, and Blue Origin, his private spaceflight company.

The man has options.

If he decided he felt like spending his money a touch foolishly, The Verge has outlined a few ways he might splurge, whilst leaving a good hundred million dollars in his account for a rainy day.

At the time of running the calculations, Bezos’ net worth sat at $193,2 billion. That’s just a touch more than the Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker, which now has his worth at $192,2 billion.

First up, your man Bezos could buy 1 932 diamond-bedazzled Damien Hirst skulls:

In 2007, artist Damien Hirst hit the headlines with For the Love of God, a model of an 18th century European man’s skull that was swathed in 8,601 diamonds. Oh, and those teeth? Those are the originals, from the dead guy.

The skull sold for a cool $100 million.

That large pear-shaped diamond in the centre of the artwork is called the Skull Star, and ranks amongst the most significant and exceptional coloured diamonds in the world.

Nobody is saying Bezos needs 1 932 of these, but now he knows he could.

If he went full petrolhead, he could also snap up 64 400 Bugatti Chirons:

The Bugatti Chiron, a $3 million car, is the kind of thing car people geek out about: “With fluid curves and angrily squinting headlights, this coupe’s exterior design communicates power and performance, and its standard 1500-hp engine endows it with acceleration capabilities worthy of a bullet train,” writes Car and Driver, dreamily.

Does anybody need more than 64 000 vehicles? No.

How about a private island, then? Bezos knows better than to get involved in the messy business of buying Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Paedophile Island’, but if you shop around, you can find some zingers:

Okay, listen, pretty much any millionaire can afford a private island…but Larry Ellison’s island, Lanai, is special. (He owns 98 percent of it.)

For starters, it’s Hawaiian, which means a more salubrious climate than Nova Scotia. It has everything! An art collection worth millions, a resort hotel that’s been featured on Secret Lives of the Super Rich, a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus that hosted Bill Gates’ wedding…

Bezos could technically afford Ellison’s island 644 times over, but that’s not possible.

If he branched out, and perused what’s on offer via Private Islands Online, he could snap up virtually every island worth in excess of $50 million and have change left over.

Is Bezos a huge Wu-Tang Clan fan? No idea, but in the hypothetical scenario that he woke up and decided he was, he may want to snap up the Martin Shkreli-owned Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a Wu-Tang Clan album, of which there is just a single copy.

Shkreli paid about $2 million for the album, according to Bloomberg. In that 2015 story, Shkreli toyed with the idea of having artists make more private albums for him. Bezos could actually do this nearly a hundred thousand times.

He could create an entire private Beyoncé catalog! Now that’s what I call music.

With a price of $2 million, Bezos could afford the album a cool 96 600 times.

All that wanton spending above aside, Bezos could also make quite a difference in the lives of billions around the world.

His fortune is enough to end hunger in the US seven times over (it’s estimated that ending hunger would cost around $25 billion), or buy 9,6 billion doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine ($2 billion for 100 million doses).

That would be enough to vaccinate 4,8 billion people, with each vaccination requiring two doses.

Pretty wealthy, right? Yes, I know he doesn’t have the full $190-odd billion lying around in disposable cash, and it’s linked to his Amazon ownership and so on, but allow the number-crunching above for the sake of escapism.

Last year, Bezos committed $10 billion to launch the Bezos Earth Fund targeting climate change, and $100 million to Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks across the country.

Next up, he may want to consider the working conditions of Amazon warehouse employees.

[source:verge]