KIRO NIGHTS

New game asks: How would you spend all of Jeff Bezos’ money?

Oct 23, 2018, 5:52 PM

Jeff Bezos, Worst People in Seattle list...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earned the top spot on the list. (AP)

(AP)

What would you do if you could spend all of Jeff Bezos’ $156 billion fortune? An interactive role-playing game lets you answer just that.

RELATED: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos spending $2 billion on homelessness, education

The “choose your own adventure” format has been a staple of pop culture for decades, but never before has it been used to figure out how to spend the vast, nearly boundless fortune of the richest man in the world

“If you get $1 billion, you’re going to change dramatically,” KIRO Nights’ Gee Scott noted.

Now imagine having 156 times that to spend on a variety of social issues, from the $55 million it would take to finally fix the Flint water crisis, or the $139 billion needed to help Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria.

“You Are Jeff Bezos” runs you through all of those scenarios, beginning with its simple concept, laid out in the opening page:

“When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You are Jeff Bezos.”

Once you click in, you’re given the option to either spend all of his money right away, use the bathroom (where you’ll accrue $540,000 in nine minutes because that’s just how Bezos’ wealth accumulates), or “scream and sob with terror over this unnatural event.”

You’re then run through scenarios where you can “pay for the Border Wall and then not build it,” hire 100,000 teachers, end homelessness, pay back taxes to the EU, fund NASA for a year, and along the way, run from the cops who start to become suspicious of Jeff Bezos’ now-reckless spending habits.

Incidentally, the real Jeff Bezos — not the wild, spend-happy one whose body you would hypothetically occupy in the aforementioned game — dropped a cool $2 billion in September as part of his Day 1 Fund to help end homelessness and provide aid to early childhood education.

Not everyone felt as though that was nearly enough to balance the scales for the richest man in the world, and if this game is any indication, it’s a number that barely puts a dent in his bank account.

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New game asks: How would you spend all of Jeff Bezos’ money?