Spend People's Money Game

Try to spend Bill Gates' $116B fortune in this online shopping game

Story by

Cara Curtis

Former TNW writer

What would you do if you woke up a billionaire? Would you take a whack at solving world hunger? Maybe travel the world? Do something boring like investing? Or maybe just buy an island?

It's hard to imagine just what you can buy with all that money. But imagine if you had$115.6 billion like Bill Gates. You too would probably think abox of frozen pizza rolls cost $22, and not $8.

So, let's spend Bill Gates' money. Introducing the web-app that lets you calculate all the different sorts of items you can buy and sell using Microsoft's co-founder's cash.

The game lists a bunch of items along with their prices that Bill (you) can buy. You have the choice to buy a luxury bottle of wine ($7,000), a book ($15), a Tesla ($75,000), and an entire cruise ship ($930,000,000).

Remember: This is just your average shopping trip, if you were Bill Gates of course.

First, I'm going to start with just the necessities to get your life off the ground — from an annual Netflix subscription, a car, some clothes, a phone, some land to build my mansion, and a… horse.

This all came to the bargain price of $35,402.

And I still have $99,999,964,598 in pocket change.

The most expensive thing I can buy on this game is the NBA basketball team for $2,120,000,000. Basically, to bankrupt myself, I could buy that NBA basketball team… multiple times (I can't even do the math).

This isn't even taking into consideration the investment returns that I could make back over time.

It's worth noting that Bill Gates isn't even the richest person on the planet, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, currently has a net worth of $199.2 billion.

There's also the misogynistic raccoon tyrant Tom Nook, the Animal Crossing slumlord outed to be 40 times richer than Bezos earlier this year.

[Read: Tom Nook is richer than Jeff Bezos — but does this raccoon deserve all that wealth?]

And I mustn't forget the insanely wealthy of the past, and those found on the world's "unofficial rich lists" who made their money in black markets, or simply inherited stupid sums of cash from the financial empires of the "Old World."

(For what it's worth, history nerds say 14th century Mali king Mansa Musa is time's richest, with an "insurmountable" net worth that's said to have included almost half the Old World's gold. Suck on those ancient apples, Gates and Bezos.)

Basically, billionaire's shouldn't exist.

If you want to see just how much Bill Gates can buy (and send yourself in a spiral of sadness), you can play Spend Bill Gates' Money here.

This is an expanded version of our daily Big Spam newsletter. You can subscribe to it here.Additional reporting by David Canellis.