How Much Money Does Jeff Bezos Make A Minute?

It is very likely that you will have heard of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and CEO. But have you ever wondered how much money does Jeff Bezos make a minute? He is the richest person in the world now so you would expect his earning power every 60 seconds to be high, wouldn’t you?

You need to be careful when you are working out how much someone earns per minute. Jeff Bezos pays himself a fairly meagre salary each year compared to other CEOs. His main wealth comes from the shares that he has in Amazon of course. Let’s start by discussing a bit more about the man himself.

Who really is Jeff Bezos?

At the time of writing this post, the net worth of Jeff Bezos was estimated to be over $189 billion. This is considerably more than Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft. His wealth is even higher than Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.

From humble beginnings in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Jeff originally had the surname “Jorgenson” but when his mother married for a second time, he was given the surname “Bezos”.  Jeff moved around as a child from Houston, Texas to Miami, Florida.

He was always interested in computers and became passionate about them. While in high school, Bezos started his very first business called the Dream Institute. Bezos went on to Princeton University and obtained a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

The Business History of Jeff Bezos

Don’t worry, we will tell you how much money Bezos makes a minute below, but before that we want to let you know how the business life of Jeff Bezos got going. When he graduated from university, Bezos was offered high paid jobs with companies like Intel. He declined these offers and formed “Fintel” in the telecommunications sector.

He did also work a couple of jobs in the financial sector which were at Bankers Trust where he was a product manager and at a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw. It was in 1993 when Bezos quit the hedge fund job to start Amazon. He got going with his new business in his garage.

The initial plan for Amazon was that of an online store for books, but over the years it became the world’s largest online retailer for just about everything. A lot of people don’t know this, but Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post as well as Amazon.

How Much Money does Jeff Bezos Make a Minute?

This is what you have been waiting for. In order to calculate the earnings of Bezos per minute we need to take his base salary into account and other earnings per year. In 1998, Bezos decided that his annual salary would be $81,840 and he still earns the same salary to this day.

Let’s look at the figures for 2019. He had his base salary of $81,840 and his other earnings for that year were around $1.7 million. He earned the same amount for many years. In order to accurately estimate how much money Jeff Bezos makes a minute, we took his annual income and also took into account the increase in hos net worth.

The most accurate figure for his annual income for 2019 was a total of $1,681,840. Divide this by 12 and you end up with a monthly earnings figure of $140,153. This equates to approximately $5005 per day and around $3.48 every minute. If you want to break this down even further, for this year Bezos made $0.058 per second.

But it doesn’t stop there – these are the figures based on his annual income alone. When you take the increase in his net worth into account then the numbers get much larger. In 2020, his net worth rose by a staggering $67.4 billion.

When you break this down you end up with a figure of approximately $321 each day. So, for every minute, Jeff Bezos makes $222,900 which is around $3,715 every second. This all means that Bezos makes $13,374,000 per hour. When you compare this to the median hourly wage of $19.33 for American citizens, it is hard to believe.

According to the Observer, the more accurate figure for how much Bezos makes every minute is $149,353. This is still $8,961,180 per hour which is a figure most people will find it difficult to comprehend. With this lower figure it means that Bezos will make around $2 million every quarter of an hour.

Final Words

So now you know the answer to “how much does Jeff Bezos make a minute?” Depending on the figures that you use, it is either $222,900 or a more conservative $149,353. No matter which way you look at it, these figures are staggering.

There is no sign of Amazon stock falling. In fact, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon made higher profits than ever before. Bezos is likely to step down as the CEO of Amazon soon as he wants to look at other possibilities. This all shows you what is possible if you put your mind to it.