Bezos Got $35 Billion Richer In 2017, Here's What You Could Buy

SEATTLE, WA - According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' wealth grew by $34.7 billion in 2017. Bezos is also the world's richest man: as of Thursday, he was worth just under $100 billion.

A majority of Bezos' wealth is in Amazon stock, according to Bloomberg. If Amazon stock dropped to $0 today, Bezos' would lose $93 billion. But don't fret, he still has an estimated $2.3 billion in cash on hand, according to Bloomberg.

But back to that $35 billion. We were curious about what that amount of money could do at the local level.

Here are just a few things $35 billion could buy:

• You could give each of the state's 64,323 teachers a $500,000 bonus
• Or, you could give each worker (about 3.5 million) in the state a $9,000 bonus
• You could give every person in the state - even the kids - a check for $4,600
• You could pay the salaries of 118,000 workers making $15 per hour for 10 years
• You could buy every homeless person in King County (11,643) a $1 million home and still have about $2 million left for each one of them
• Or, you could rent each one of them a $2,000/month apartment for over 100 years
• Or, you could pay rent on a $2,000/month apartment for 1.4 million people for one year
• You could pay the monthly state average health insurance premium ($279.37) for over 500,000 people for 20 years
• You could pay for two years of treatment ($379,000 per year) for the state's estimated 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients
• You could pay for more than half of the Sound Transit 3 transit package (which will cost about $53.8 billion)
• Or, you could pay 23 million $1,500 car tab renewal fees
• You could pay the full tuition ($282,000) for about 120,000 students to attend Yale University
• Or, you could send about 319,000 students to the University of Washington for four years (about one-third of students in the entire state)
• You could build over 400 state-of-the-art high schools similar to Bellevue's Sammamish High School, which cost $78 million
• You could easily wipe out school lunch debt in the state, forever
• You could buy Seattle's Columbia Center - the state's tallest building - multiple times over
• You could buy an NBA team and still have enough left over to build a new arena
• You could fund the Refugee Women's Alliance (ReWA) annual budget into the next millennium
• Or you could double ReWA's annual budget and still fund it into the next millennium
• You could fund the Ballard Food Bank, White Center Food Bank, City Fruit, Food Lifeline, and Northwest Harvest at current annual funding levels for over 200 years
• You could fund the Sno-Isle, King, and Pierce County library systems at 2018 levels for the next 135 years
• You could buy every person in the U.S. a full coho salmon at Pike Place Market and still have money left over
• Finally, you could buy a 2017 model year Subaru Forester for 1.4 million people

What problem would you solve with $35 billion?

Caption: President Donald Trump, left, and Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, center, listen as Jeff Bezos, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, speaks during an American Technology Council roundtable in the State Dinning Room of the White House, Monday, June 19, 2017, in Washington.

Photo by Alex Brandon/Associated Press