If you try to imagine the amount of real things Bezos can buy, and even more, the amazing mass of 200B$ in 10 dollars bills, you then realize his fortune is more a symbolic attribute than the transposition of productible stuffs in real economy. This absurd level of fortune shows us that we don't live in a pure rational world/economy, but rather that we still follow and believe in fictive or conventional representations of wealth. The question is : how long people will still believe in theses social conventions, because as a last resort our actual world stand on social beliefs.
That is not the amount of money Bezos has, that is the estimated selling price of the stuff he owns. He could use it as money (by paying in fraction of shares) but a significant part of the value relies on the fact that he is not currently selling (a substantial part) of his wealth.
Similarly for Musk, it is easy to imagine how quickly Tesla value would drop if Musk where to tweet "I will now sell all of my shares" (he received a formal complaint because he said something that was vaguely close to it)
> you then realize his fortune is more a symbolic attribute than
This isn't much if an epiphany. These net worth values are just loose estimates of hypothetical values obtained by blindly summing coarse appraisals given the current state of things. They have always been like that.
... Which of course the authors of the Forbes article never did, judging by some of the obvious historical competitors (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc) they missed.
Leaving aside the bias for figures from the last 200 years (ignoring many figures from earlier epochs, whose shares of global wealth were no doubt comparable, or most likely far higher).