Another way to see the huge difference between $1m and $1b:
Let's say you made $1/second (which is an insanely good salary, $3600/hr), and you earned this not just business hours, but 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Earning $1m would take you less than 12 days. Earning $1b would take you over 31 years.
The average giraffe is about 4.44 meters long. Expressed in millimeters, a half giraffe as a unit of measurement would be 2,220 millimeters. So I guess a half giraffe is like... 2.22 meters or 2.22 billionaires. So a millionaire is 1/2220 half giraffes.
A million cats would probably be enough to take over your neighborhood. A billion cats would be enough to form a furry, meowing carpet that could blanket an entire small country.
I like this example. And OP said 5000 years worth of income. $100K is above average. 5000 years of above average income only takes you halfway up the meterstick. And the top 10 billionaires in the world are all worth over $100B, which means that their worth is over 100 m high, or roughly a 30 story building.
5000 years of above average wealth, measured in Millions of dollars per mm, only takes you to about the height of your knees, while the world's richest individuals are looking down at you from the tops of 30 story buildings.
Imagine something one inch in size which costs sixteen thousand dollars. Holy crap that's expensive! That's in ultra-custom-jewelry territory! In some jobs that's an annual salary!
This is why I laugh at the bootlickers who cry that raising taxes on the rich would be "punishing success". If you just take away 99% of a billionaire's assets, he's still got ten million bucks. There's no appreciable effect on their quality of life, even after losing statistically everything.
Um... you know that if all the owners disappeared tomorrow, the workers could still go to work and make products, right? They'd just be doing it for themselves and their communities instead of some rich asshole.
My wife is a corporate tax accountant, her responsibility is calculating how much her company owes in sales tax for purchases. I remember just a few years ago when she started auditing her old company's tax liability they hounded her to find every single nickel and dime of possible savings because it was a relatively small company. Still large but small enough. Now she's at a multinational company. She was going over taxes for some purchase earlier this year and managed to get their total liability down to $1.2 million, but she had a discrepancy of $15k that she was pouring over trying to get to zero and her boss was like "and? Just pay it. It's only $15k."
I have no idea what her company does but she comes home some days and is like I just had to pay $10 million in taxes. Not a $10mil purchase, the sales tax was $10 million. And that was after she was able to bring it down using various magic witch tricks to find tax discounts. I know enough about tax to know I hate it.
A billionaire is waiting in line to check in to his Vegas hotel while some guy in a nice suit paired with a pristine Stetson is making a stink about his room to the receptionist. Billionaire asks if he can just go ahead and get his key real quick since this obviously isn't going to be over any time soon.
"Cowboy" yells, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I'M WORTH 12 MILLION DOLLARS!!!" Billionaire sizes him up for about 3 seconds.
"The difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her." - Relevant xkcd
To put another way, you could have earned $3.33 every single second since the year 1AD, and still be worth less than Elon Musk is worth today. ($212b vs $213b)
That is $31.5 million a year, invested into the S&P 500 every single year with dividends reinvested, at an average rate of return of 10%, would net you $6.3 billion at the end of 31 years.
Keep the scale going…1 trillion dollars at $1 per second would take you 32,000 years. Longer than the human record (and some billionaires are on their way to this number)
I was just thinking about this the other day. With 7 trillion dollar budget, which is projected for 2025, it would take something like 0.01% to end homelessness. At market rate rent.
205 people in America who earn more than $50 million a year in wages alone.Oct 22, 2018
It would take them 20 years to make $1B through wages alone at 50M/yr. I'll guess that number hasn't gone up much, since compensation in stock is far better than simple cash in these situations.
Worse yet, if you made $1/second 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, it would take roughly 6,700 years to accumulate Elon Musk’s net worth… or approximately $1 per second since 1,500 years before ancient Egypt arose
During bill gates higher earning years if he dropped a check worth $1,000 on the sidewalk it was not worth his time to stop and pick it up. This assumed working 14 hours per day and dividing his income out. And this isn't even using his highest income levels.
My favorite thing is to extend this to a trillion dollars. Keeping the rate of $1/second, continuously, a trillion seconds is about 31,710 years.
For context, to have a trillion dollars at this rate, you would've had to begin earning money about 20,000 years before the end of the Pleistocene era (you know, back when cavemen were chasing wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers), well before the emergence of the first human civilizations in Mesopotamia.
So when someone talks about a trillion dollar company or a national budget, keep this frame of reference in mind.
This was the way that was explained to me that broke my brain too. To add to it -- a trillion is 31,000 years lol, and the US has almost 35 trillion in debt.
Of course not, but it contextualizes how much that really is. Most people see million / billion / trillion and just think big number and don't really realize how significantly different they all are. A million is a drop in the bucket to a billion, and a billion is a drop in the bucket to a trillion.
I remember when this was told a few years ago, and it was like, “A million seconds ago? Less than twelve days ago. A billion seconds ago? The Soviet Union was still intact.
The most impactful dumbing down of this immense difference that I’ve seen, which put it all into perspective for me as an average person was this: Take a $1 bill. Now imagine this single dollar is worth $100. A person who possesses a million dollars would have 10,000 of these. A person who possesses a billion would have 10,000,000 of them. For some reason this illustration just killed me. I think it’s because $1 means a little something to me in my day-to-day. And I feel like an idiot if I impulsively spend $100 on something or lose it somehow or get shorted that on a paycheck… It is totally fucked that we have any billionaires. My buddy always says, “If you make a billion dollars you should just get a trophy that says, ‘Congratulations, you won Capitalism!’ and then you just stop earning money and it goes somewhere else because no single person or family needs or deserves that much money.
I've been told before that the difference is that a million seconds is 12 days and a billion seconds is 31 years and some, which is exactly what you said just a lil simplified.
This is exactly what I did to explain to my mom the billion-second birthday party I was throwing, lol. I told her I was approaching 1 billion seconds old and I wanted to host a party to celebrate. She was surprised that one billion seconds is 31~ years, but she said she and my dad would come.
I wanted to cook something that could help visually represent a billion, so I calculated a how much one billion grains of rice was just for laughs... it's roughly 71.5 tons of rice. To put it another way, once cooked, it would serve one cup of cooked rice each to 1,430,000 people. There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, and each has its own stadium. Each stadium has an average of 42,675 seats. If every seat of every stadium was full at the same time, one billion grains of rice could serve every single person one cup, and then you would still have 200,000 servings left.
I ended up serving paella and told everyone that each grain of rice represented about 2.5 hours of time I've been kicking it around here on Earth. It's such a wild concept, thinking of it like that! Just looking at a tablespoon of cooked rice which has about 100 grains, that's the equivalent of 250 hours, or about 10.5 days.... which is about 1 million seconds. One million is to one billion what one spoon of rice is to a whole pot of paella.
The dinner party was so much fun. My mom made a cake and got number candles for 1,000,000,000! 🥰
I've always tried to tell this to people, but just as time. That a million seconds is 12 days and a billion is 31 years. Sometimes it's hard for them to understand but when it clicks it really puts in perspective.
I would like to hear from any folks who have difficulty with sarcasm, because I wouldn’t be able to understand how they’d not get this. Human lifespans are obviously way under this.
And yet, there are average people earning $50k/year defending and trying to justify Elon Musk's whining about the courts trying to prevent him from getting another $56 billion when he already is $200 billion.
There must be something wired really fucked up in a person's mind when they already have so much money yet it's still not enough. Having another $50 billion to this guy isn't going to change anything in his life. For someone at that level of wealth, the marginal utility of any additional dollar must be approaching 0. It would be like an average person hiring an entire law firm and going to the highest court to sue a coffee shop because they didnt' give you a coffee when you had a coupon.
Yeah it's incredible. With $1,000,000,000 you could spend $1,000 a day every day since the day Jesus was born, and you'd still have over $272,650,000. I couldn't imagine the amount of good you could do with that sort of wealth.
Well not to be that guy but if the earliest recorded history dates back to written records in Egypt ~3200BCE, then 3200+2024 = 5224 x 365 x100,000 = 190,676,000,000
This puts you at #4 past mark Zuckerberg at ~166 billion
Not to be that guy, but that would be in Mesopotamia 5000 BC for recorded history. Can even take it further for known history to around 9500 BC (some even claim 13000 BC) in Gobekli Tepe. Recalculations are in order.
If I made 100k/ year we could t afford to keep doing medical research...or that's what my boss tells me. Instead I make 50k to perform critical and highly complex surgical tasks while ensuring scientific integrity.
You could move to Florida, buy a nice 2 bedroom built in the 90's a few dozen miles from the beach, and still have money for nearly an entire year of insurance!
Less is more in this vase I guess :3 Maybe a metaphor or something of how society is constructed to let you down the more you try to succeed or something
Halfway there + Investment experts + chilling on it for a few years = there. At $500m you have access to options that we peons will never even hear about. It's the barrier to entry that makes it such a bitch. I'd take it.
5 million at 5% earns $250k, or $4807.69 a week. Doing nothing. I can easily live on $100k a year and do everything I want to do. It only costs $182.5k a year to spend every night in a hotel at $500 a night. They'll probably give you a better deal if you book the year. You're talking about 100 times that, and 500 million earns you 25 million a year or $480,769.23 a week. How does it hurt to be 100 times richer than I need to be to live in extravagance for the rest of my life?
I don’t earn £100k but if I had 5000 x my last years take home pay I would magically end up with £275mil. This would be entirely enough on its own for me to live with, and provide for the following forever generations of my family. Plus I would then be sensible and start using the money to make money in a safe, secure way. Nothing risky. I don’t need to be a billionaire, being quarter of a way there is still insanely wealthy.
Yeah but if you put 500M into the market and followed the 4% rule you would have up to 20M to spend each year, and another 20M in potential growth with a modest 8% on average per year.
The difference would be that this person would have a pile of cash and most billionaires have theoretical wealth. Remember how Kanye stopped being a billionaire. He didn't lose anything except popularity. Billionaires don't have a billion dollars but companies which banks will treat as a billion dollar value.
i do agree with you, but even w how much i make (27k a yr), that would set me up for a very long time. fuck even one years income all at once would be insane to me. i cannot fathom billionaires.
And then think further about it. Does that change the fact that 5000 years worth of income would be HELL of a lot of money for you? Do you think you could reasonably use that amount of money in your lifetime? I definitely would say that even 100 years worth of income would be enough for me to have hell of a good life without any worrying.
That's why we don't need billionaires. There's no need for anyone to have that much money. Not at all.
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u/duhogman 5d ago
If you made $100k per year that would put you at half way to being a billionaire. Kinda hurts to put that into perspective.