Man Goes Viral Using Rice to Show Jeff Bezos’ Wealth on TikTok
By Carl Samson
An e-commerce consultant who found his niche on TikTok by posting financial literacy videos has gone viral after using grains of rice to create a visual representation of Jeff Bezos’s wealth.
Humphrey Yang, 32, first demonstrated how $100,000, $1 million and $1 billion would look like in terms of rice grains.
In doing this, he made one grain of rice equivalent to $100,000, which means that 10 grains totaled $1 million.
After painstaking hours of counting grains, Yang managed to visualize $1 billion, equivalent to 10,000 grains.
As if his patience was short of impressive, in a second video, Yang compared the original values to the reported net worth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
To his own shock, Yang ended up isolating 58 pounds (26.31 kilograms) of rice to meet an equivalent of $122 billion, which was Bezos’s net worth at the time.
Needless to say, the stark contrast in the amount of rice showed the massive wealth gap between Bezos and the average American, who has a median net worth of $97,300, according to Market Watch.
Using Yang’s standard, that amount is less than a grain of rice.
“I don’t even have one grain of rice,” a TikTok user commented succinctly.
Another claimed, “Honestly this represents everything that is wrong with our world.”
Yang says he simply wanted to create a visual representation of wealth.
“I wanted to present the information the best I could without putting a spin on it; other people can put their spin on it,” he told BuzzFeed News.
“But I realize now after I posted the video that a ton of the comments — I’d say 80% of the comments — are saying that wealth is such an inequality, no one should have that much money, and ‘we’re out here struggling for half a grain of rice, which is 50K.'”
“That’s what’s sparking it [the discussion].”
Yang’s videos, now with more than two million plays, have also gone viral on YouTube and Twitter, where they have garnered similar sentiments.
“Gross. Not you or your analogies, the disproportionate wealth,” a Twitter user commented.
As of March 4, Bezos has a net worth of $118.9 billion, according to Forbes. He remains the richest person on the face of the planet.
Feature Image Screenshots via @humphreytalks
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