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How the fantasy spending game worked
Sarah Marquart’s March 24, 2021 Interesting Engineering article attributed the game to Reddit user Paul McBurney Jr. It described profiles for Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Bloomberg, Donald Trump, and the Federal Government, alongside 34 suggested spending options.
The basic idea was straightforward: start with a displayed fortune, select items or causes with prices assigned by the game, and watch the remaining balance change. That turns a number most people cannot intuitively picture into a simple comparison: even extravagant purchases are small relative to a fortune measured in hundreds of billions.
What the game can—and cannot—tell you
It illustrates scale
The simulator is best understood as a thought experiment. It lets a visitor play with hypothetical spending and compare luxury purchases with much larger social needs, such as hunger, clean water, or homelessness. Its useful lesson is about the magnitude of wealth, not an actionable plan for shopping or giving.
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Its numbers are not a current financial snapshot
The 2021 article reported Bezos’s net worth as $185.8 billion as of Q1 2021. That is a dated historical figure, not a current estimate. Net worth estimates also describe the value of assets less liabilities; they are not equivalent to cash available in a bank account.
Game prices need not reflect real market prices
Marquart cautioned that some listed item prices could be questionable. Treat the prices as game inputs or illustrations, not independently verified quotes. A real private jet, mansion, or charitable intervention can have costs that depend on specifications, location, timing, operating expenses, and other factors; the game’s displayed figure does not establish what such a purchase would actually cost.
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Is the original website still available?
The original site attributed to McBurney was not confirmed as currently available or unchanged. A page called Spend Money Game currently describes a virtual shopping simulator and lists a Jeff Bezos game, but available information does not establish that it is the same project covered by the 2021 article. Similar subject matter alone is not enough to identify the two sites as one.
If you encounter a current billionaire-spending simulator, check its own displayed figures, item prices, and terms rather than assuming they match the older version. The original article is useful for understanding what the headline referred to, but it does not verify the present status or accuracy of any simulator.
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