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You'd pay $12.8 billion to buy one of everything on Amazon

Amazon package

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon is like an endless candy store for shoppers, full of everything and anything you could think of to buy. So how much would it cost to get one of everything?

About $12.86 billion, calculates a computer scientist based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Kynan Eng did the math in answer to a question posted on Quora, a site where people can pose questions for others to answer.

Eng based his calculations on the number of items available on Amazon’s main website, which was 479 million. He then calculated the average price of an item to be $26.86.

The calculation is a little far afield from his day job, which is as the president of iniLabs, a Zurich-based company that focuses on brain research and computers, with a side interest in using virtual reality as a rehabilitation tool.

He came to Quora to respond to questions about the intersection between neuroscience and human-computer interaction but then "fairly quickly found myself getting diverted answering silly questions,” he said from Switzerland.

One of his first answers was about how much money was spent rescuing Matt Damon in all his various movies.

The total came out to $900 billion “plus change,” he wrote.

That included $100,000 for the search party in "Saving Private Ryan," $100 million for space station security deployment and damages in "Elysium" and $200 billion for the Mars mission and rescue in "The Martian."

He's also come up with a name for his new hobby.

"I call it 'amateur fictional economics,'" he said.

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