Lindsey Wasson/Reuters
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos makes more in one minute than the median US worker makes in one year.
- Amazon announced on Tuesday plans to raise the company's minimum wage in the US to $15.
- Despite this salary increase, Amazon workers don't make close to what CEO Jeff Bezos makes.
- We calculated how much Bezos makes in one year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced plans to increase the company's minimum wage in the US to $15 - more than twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Currently, the median annual worker pay at Amazon is $28,466.
But neither Amazon's minimum wage increase nor the median annual worker pay is close to how much Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos - the world's richest man, according to Forbes - makes.
We calculated the CEO's annual earnings by finding the difference between Bezos' 2017 and 2018 net worths (calculated in October of each year) as provided by the Forbes 400 list. But what does that translate to per month, or even per second? From his annual earnings, which we determined to be $78.5 billion, we then calculated how much Bezos earns in smaller time frames.
Business Insider previously calculated Bezos' annual and hourly earnings using Forbes' annual billionaire's list, published every March, but we've updated these calculations using the latest Forbes 400 list, published on October 3.
This estimation of Bezos' wages are being used for the sake of comparison. A large portion of his wealth is tied to Amazon stock, which can increase or decrease in value at any given time.
Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
At the annual earnings rate Business Insider calculated - again, an estimation based on the change in his Forbes net worth year-over-year - Bezos has earned $6.54 billion a month, more than $1.5 billion a week, and more than $215 million a day in the last 12 months.
Per hour, he earns a whopping $8,961,187 million - that's roughly 315 times Amazon's $28,466 median annual worker pay. An Amazon worker earning the $15 minimum wage would need to work about 597,412 hours, or 24 hours a day for about 68 years, just to earn what Bezos makes in one hour.
Bezos' hourly rate is equivalent to $149,353 a minute. To put things in perspective, Bezos makes more than three times what the median US worker makes in year - $45,552, according to data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics - in one minute.
In one second, Bezos also makes more than twice what the median US worker makes in one week - $2,489 compared to $876, respectively.
For Bezos, time is money - a lot of it.