Once net worth is that high, the majority of it seems to be attributable to stock market and other similarly intangible $, rather than $ someone has literally directly taken/earned from others. It seems unfair to expect humans to contemplate big numbers (something we're known to be bad at) by also thinking about imaginary $ as though they had a 1-for-1 tangible source.
That being said, you certainly aren't wrong to think of it this way. For example, Bezos' net worth of ~$110B / ~333M Americans = ~$333/American , which sounds like a reasonable ballpark approximation of how much _profit_ the average person has spent on Amazon + Audible + AWS + WaPo.
Thanks for giving examples of logical ways to process large numbers. These are good ways to double-check quick maths.
- One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example?
- One person could spend $1M-per-American without anything very interesting or noteworthy happening to the people taking that money in payment.
- One person could spend enough for $1M/American on a Presidential run and lose; did Hillary and Trump and the other candidates also spend that much (WOW!) or did they spend nothing by comparison and still beat Bloomberg? (also wow!).
- One Presidential run could cost so much; $1M/American is a lot more than Americans earn every year and therefore pay in tax every year, and handwaving debt away it's therefore many times more than government annual spending on everything; infrastructure, military, social services, schooling, etc. Suspiciously high.
- A million per American is in the region of 340 Trillion, several times the world's GDP.
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman