What To Do With Your Goldman Sachs Bonus

By
MARY KATHRYN BURKE and ELIZABETH KOLLEENY
February 27, 2008, 10:39 PM ET
3 min read

Dec. 13, 2006 — -- It was reported today that Wall Street's famed investment bank Goldman Sachs will be shelling out over $16 billion in bonuses this holiday season -- an average of over $600,000 per employee.

Many of those bonuses will be performance-based, so some of the company's bigwigs are likely to get as much as $100 million.

With all that cash coming in, it's easy to wonder what someone might buy with a $100 million holiday bonus.

You could provide immunizations for more than 40,000 impoverished children for a year ($37.5 million), then throw a birthday party for your daughter and one million of her closest friends ($60 million). You'd still have enough to buy a different color Rolls Royce for each day of the week ($2.5 million).

You could feed about 800,000 children for a year ($60 million), recreate the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston weddings four times over ($16 million), buy one of Mel Gibson's private islands ($15 million), and still remain a millionaire nine times over.

You could pay Harvard tuition for more than 1,500 students who couldn't afford it ($70.5 million), provide health care to over 1,000 Americans for a year ($7 million), and still have enough to buy a different Brioni designer suit for every single day of the year ($6,000 suits for all 365 days would cost $22 million).

You could take everyone in the country of Grenada to a Broadway show, then buy the most expensive apartment in New York City (a triplex penthouse at the Pierre Hotel, $70 million), and still have an extra $15 million dollars in your pocket -- over 300 times the median income of the average American household.

You could buy every person in Kansas City a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes (147,000 pairs of $400 shoes comes out to about $60 million) and still have $40 million dollars left -- that's more than 500 times the average doctor's salary in the United States (about $80,000).

You could buy 1,000 gala tables at your favorite charity's ball ($10 million), provide winter blankets for 350,000 children in developing countries ($14 million), personally pay Derek Jeter's salary for a year ($21 million), and still buy your own private Boeing jet ($55 million).

You still could not pay to insure Jennifer Lopez's backside though -- rumored to be worth a cool $1 billion, according to the New York Post.