Jeff Bezos certainly has a lot of money after the mass success of Amazon, but is that enough money to purchase a country?
Jeff Bezos can theoretically buy a country. As the world’s wealthiest man, he has the money available to him. However, it is against international law for an individual to buy a country. That of course does not mean that it couldn’t be done.
Read more below on just how much money Jeff Bezos has and how that could translate into buying a country.
Jeff Bezos’ Net Worth
The entire world seems to use either Amazon or one of its subsidiary companies on almost a daily basis. Whether it’s to look up movies on IMDb, listen to any audiobook through Audible, or watching TV on Prime, all of these actions translate to money in Jeff Bezos’ pockets.
After founding the company Amazon in 1994, Bezos managed to turn the company from being an online bookstore into the world’s largest eCommerce website. He forever changed the way that the world shops and consumes.
How much money did the company’s wild success make Jeff Bezos? Well, it was most recently reported to Fortune that his net worth in US dollars was $138.5 billion. You can check out real-time billionaire statistics on the Forbes website.
What is a Country’s GDP Worth?
With a net worth of $138.5 billion, how does Jeff Bezos compare to the wealth of an actual country? In order to compare the two, you have to look at the country’s Gross Domestic Product also known as a GDP.
The GDP of Bezos’ home country the United States is roughly $21 trillion US dollars. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world if looking at the GDP. Bezos is off by a long shot from ever buying the good ol’ US of A. The same goes for the United Kingdom with a GDP of roughly $3 trillion US dollars.
What about a smaller country though? It was in 2017 that a list of countries by GDP was released by the World Bank. This means the numbers are slightly outdated, but looking at the figures tells us that Jeff Bezos would be the 56th richest country in the world. He would sit right by Hungary. This means he has enough money to buy over 140 countries. In some cases, he has enough money to buy more than one, say Iceland, Uganda, and Bahrain.
You can watch the below YouTube video that shows how many countries were poorer than Bezos when his net worth was $101 billion in 2018.
Would Bezos Even Want to Buy a Country? Is it even legal?
Even though Bezos does have enough money to buy a country, he could never do so. It is against international law for an individual to purchase a country. If that weren’t an issue, would Bezos even want to own a country? Based on his habits, probably not.
As Pascal Moramacil put it in his response to this question on Quora “You have to provide roads, and organize a military, and police, and a judicial system, and probably healthcare, and education, and things like that…” That seems like way too much of a headache for Bezos.
With that point aside, Bezos has had his sights set on a loftier goal than buying a country. For a long time now, Bezos has been aiming for the stars with his investments in space exploration and industrialization. His company Blue Origin is focused mainly on this. Part of their mission statement reads “Blue Origin believes that in order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.”
It seems that Bezos is probably amassing his fortune to be a space pioneer, not to buy a country. After all, going to space has been his dream since he was a little boy.