The question seems to be very obvious so I eliminated the very obvious answer to it in the title itself. Yes, It’s not jeff bezos, even though the whole world including google will give you the same answer, he is not. And yes I’ll tell you how he is not in this blog but you are open to criticize me in the comments below. But right now, the most important question is not how but who: who is the richest person afterall?
But first, let’s go through the basics. When can a person be considered rich? Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a philosophical answer like rich means someone who is happy or healthy or beautiful or blah blah blah. Being rich simply means one who has enough money to buy anything they want without giving it a second thought. It means that they have enough money to not have to wake up everyday and rush through their breakfast to go to a job they hate. It simply means you don’t HAVE to work for money.
Now that we have cracked what being rich means, let’s go back to jeff bezos. Google says that jeff bezos has 18,240 crores USD or if you hate maths then 8,37,839 crore rupees. Now it’s true that it is the highest any living being has but the catch here is that almost all of it is in shares of Amazon. It’s true that he can sell those shares at any time in the market to buy anything without giving it a second thought (which is our metric of richness) but the sad truth is that no one has that much of money to buy his shares and so even if he has the most amount of money on paper, he just can’t use it to buy unnecessary stuff without a second thought. On top of that, if he sells a ton of his holding altogether, amazon’s share prices would crash which would drastically decrease his net worth. Thus it’s a paradox where if he sell his shares to not have to wake up everyday and rush through breakfast to go to a job that he hates then it will decrease his richness on paper also. And the same paradox is true for all those who are counted in top 10 or top 50 or top 500 richest person on earth. Their richness is tied to either shares or real estate or any other type of asset which they just can’t liquidate at all times to splurge on luxury items without getting anxiety about it, quite middle class of them.
Hence, the question: who is the richest person on earth?
If we go by our metric, it’ll be someone who has the highest cash flow coming in and not someone who has the highest net worth but gets major anxiety on buying a private plane or luxury cruise yacht. And fortunately enough, such a metric has still not been put out by anyone. So we don’t know who actually is the richest person on earth, atleast not yet. It can be anyone. It can be a politician who has hoarded enough black money to buy just about anything he sets his eye on or a drug dealer . Heck, it can be Lauren Sanchez, jeff bezos girlfriend, because she doesn’t really have to pay for anything that she buys and hence no anxiety. Until such a metric comes to measure people’s wealth, you need to be on everyone’s good side because he might be that annoying person whose texts you keep ignoring. Heck, It can be you!