Can you picture a billion dollars? Let alone 172 billion of them?
That was just part of data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s challenge with “9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth,” a combination of statistics and whimsical illustrations that break down a net worth unfathomable to most that just won the 2023 Pulitzer prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.
The piece, which ran as part of a special issue of The New York Times Magazine in April 2022 focusing on the increasing number of billionaires in the United States, opens with an illustration of Bezos, the executive chairman of Amazon, as a king, complete with bejeweled crown and fur-lined cape, considering his empire atop a cardboard throne of Amazon boxes.
Chalabi, now a data editor at Guardian US who worked on the Bezos piece as a Times contributor, scoured the internet for reliable figures on Bezos’ net worth. She found educated guesses and piles of estimates from financial reporting and limited documentation of the Amazon founder’s worth.
“Data around billionaires’ true wealth is about as murky as swamp water,” Chalabi writes in the introduction. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to wade through it!”
That wading comes in the form of “striking illustrations that combine statistical reporting with keen analysis to help readers understand the immense wealth and economic power of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” the Pulitzer Board’s citation reads.
(Screenshot/The New York Times)
A cartoon Bezos dives headfirst into a bar chart, showing his $15.6 billion assets in cash pale in comparison to the oceanic scale of his Amazon stock valuation. His wealth is envisioned as a cake, with Chalabi imagining what slices could do for society: a slim slice of carrot cake, 1.9% of the whole shebang, would cover pre-K for every U.S. child for a year.
When comparing his net worth with the median U.S. household, the difference in scale gets truly ridiculous, highlighting Chalabi’s ingenuity with communicating a gulf so large it veers into the absurd. If money was decibels, median wealth is a quiet library and Bezos is a jet taking off.
Other comparisons turn Bezos’ wealth into what could fit in a metaphorical backyard of his owned property, a magic mirror showing the lifetimes it would take to earn his worth, a temperature comparison that required fudging the scale so the reader wouldn’t have to scroll for minutes — as Bezos’ wealth is to the heat of the sun, so is a median household net worth to sweater weather.
Chalabi ends on a meta note, with a drawing of herself working on these drawings in her home office for 95 hours compared to what Bezos could buy with 95 hours of income: a $169 million Park Avenue apartment.
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