You Are Jeff Bezos is a short, browser-based Twine game that asks what you would spend a fictionalized version of Jeff Bezos’s fortune on. Its menu ranges from social causes to absurd, pointed jokes—but the numbers are deliberately unreliable, and even a GeekWire reporter’s 2018 playthrough left $90 billion unspent after several huge purchases.
What is You Are Jeff Bezos?
Created by writer Kris Ligman, You Are Jeff Bezos is a text-driven, choose-your-own-adventure game built with Twine 2. The player wakes up in Jeff Bezos’s body and is invited to spend the immense fortune represented in the game. Rather than simulate investing, taxation, or public budgets, it presents a menu of civic causes and comic or politically pointed choices.
Ligman said they wrote the game in four days. In a later postmortem, they described it as a “power fantasy” that reduces “massive real-life social problems” to a few round numbers. That simplification is central to the game’s premise, not a claim that the problems can actually be solved for those amounts. Ligman’s postmortem and the Motherboard coverage discuss the game and its intent.
Why can’t you spend it all?
GeekWire’s October 22, 2018 account described a starting balance of $156 billion and reported that the writer still had $90 billion after selecting several large expenditures. The reported menu included $139 billion to repair Puerto Rico, $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States, and $1.5 trillion for student loan debt. These are historical figures from the game as reported in 2018—not verified estimates of what those issues cost, and not a dependable economic model. GeekWire’s account describes the reporter’s playthrough.
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The apparent mismatch is part of the thought experiment’s rough, simplified arithmetic. The game’s own disclaimer warns: “A lot of the numbers here are totally fake, based on cursory internet searches, and should be taken with a large grain of salt.” Treat the price tags as prompts for play and reflection, not as policy proposals or current costings.
What the game is trying to say
The choices turn vast wealth into a sequence of individual decisions: pick a cause, see a price tag, and decide what to fund next. That makes the experience easy to understand, but it also compresses complicated social problems into a menu and a balance counter. The game’s joke is partly in that mismatch: sums that seem unimaginably large can still look inadequate or arbitrary when set against issues of enormous scale.
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Ligman connected the game’s appeal to the feeling that money is a system most people did not choose but cannot easily escape. That is the creator’s interpretation, offered in the postmortem—not a promise that the game’s options demonstrate how wealth or public policy works in reality.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where to play it—and what to expect
The original work is a browser-based Twine game, not a financial simulator or a conventional strategy game. The available reporting and creator material establish its format and historical release, but do not establish whether the original game remains accessible today. If you do find it, expect a brief text-led thought experiment built around choices and intentionally rough numbers, rather than a realistic accounting of Bezos’s current fortune or the cost of social programs.
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