Mike Bloomberg has a lot of money, and he is running for president.
Both of those facts are pretty well known to anyone following the US presidential election and the first two contests in the Democratic primary over the last couple weeks.
But what's really hard to appreciate is just how extremely wealthy the business media mogul and former New York City mayor truly is.
Forbes maintains estimates of the net worth of everyone still in the presidential race, based on "financial disclosure statements, scouring local real-estate records, and calculating pension benefits."
According to those estimates, Bloomberg is worth $61.8 billion. The bulk of that wealth comes from his ownership stake in his eponymous business information and media company, Bloomberg LP, according to Business Insider's Katie Warren and Emmie Martin.
Bloomberg's fortune is nearly 20 times Forbes' estimate for the wealth of the next-highest contender, incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his estimated net worth of $3.1 billion (although it's worth noting that Trump's exact wealth is unknown, as he has not released any of his tax returns as is traditional for presidents and candidates).
To get a sense of just how much richer Bloomberg is than anyone else in the field, we put Forbes' candidate net worth estimates into the following chart. The area of each candidate's circle represents his or her wealth.
Behold:
The chart loosely resembles a scale model of the solar system, with a giant sun dwarfing even the largest planets in its orbit. Bloomberg's money hoard outclasses even his fellow billionaires in the race, and on this scale, most of the net worths of the other Democratic candidates - most of whom are millionaires - appear as small dots.
Indeed, Bloomberg's net worth is about 13 times the combined wealth of the rest of the presidential field.
What does all that money get you? Bloomberg has hired an elite campaign staff working on an unorthodox strategy, ignoring the early primary states and focusing on the massive delegate haul available in the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. As Politico put it in their Playbook Audio Briefing podcast on Thursday, "the goal here is to create an aura of professionalism and invincibility."
Bloomberg has been investing heavily in advertising, running TV ads for months, including an $11 million Super Bowl spot gunning directly for Trump. According to CNN's Brian Stelter, as of February 9, Bloomberg had spent over $350 million on ads, nearly twice what fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer had spent, and several times what any other Democratic candidate had bought on the airwaves.
And it's not just TV - earlier this week, several popular Instagram meme accounts suddenly started posting pro-Bloomberg images as part of a campaign push to target younger, social-media-friendly voters.
It appears the media-heavy strategy could be working. Despite sitting out the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Bloomberg is in third place in Real Clear Politics' national polling average of the Democratic primary behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
We will see if Bloomberg's outsize wealth and unorthodox strategy will lead to electoral success, with the next voting happening in the Nevada caucuses on February 22, the South Carolina primary on February 29, and over a dozen states and territories holding contests on March 3.
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