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You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

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Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#21

Post by Atreiden »

Nice comparison, but this piece of math doesn't quite work out:

> If you earn $25 per hour, Musk makes that equivalent in passive investment returns every 58.400 seconds (assuming a conservative 5% annual return on his wealth).

(450,000,000,000 * .05) / 365 / 86400 (seconds/day) = $713.47/second.

You'd have to work 28.539 hours at $25/hour to make what he makes passively in one second.

Put another way, your annual income working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year without time off, (40 * 52 * 25 = $52,000) would take him 72.89 seconds or 1.21 minutes to achieve passively at the conservative 5% annual return rate.

Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#22

Post by nsxwolf »

spencerflem wrote: post #4

I find this visualization of wealth where every dollar is a pixel a lot more compelling: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3

This one is rather preachy. It is unintentionally arguing the existence of Amazon itself is bad and that everyone would be better off without it, including all the people it employs and serves, directly and indirectly.

Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#24

Post by avalys »

That's cute, but these measures of "wealth" are misleading in a subtle way.

The way articles like this and most popular media portrays it, people like Jeff Bezos are wealthy because they are hoarding money that they somehow extracted from the productive economy and diverted to their use by nefarious means. Like fairy tale dragons perched on their pile of gold and treasure at the top of a mountain, lording it over the poor peasants in the village down below.

When in reality, someone like Bezos or Musk is "worth" their billions of dollars only in some theoretical sense, based on the notional book value of their ownership of the immensely productive and valuable compan(ies) they built. This is entirely abstract - they could likely not sell their share for cash. But more importantly, it generally represents wealth that truly has been "created" - in 2000 there was no SpaceX and no Tesla, and now there is, and they're 'worth' $800 billion dollars, and Musk "owns" a large fraction of that. But this is entirely wealth that was created from zero through the creation and organization and leadership of these companies. It wasn't taken from anyone, taken from workers or consumers, or diverted from the economy. It was created out of thin air!

Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#25

Post by iandanforth »

grajaganDev wrote: post #9

LA fires destroyed 17000 houses. Roughly average value: $3 million each. That is $51 billion by my calculation. Musk is worth $400 billion.

$430B according to Forbes real time billionaires list. Nitpicky? Yes. But it's $30 billion dollars.

Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#28

Post by esotericimpl »

avalys wrote: post #24

That's cute, but these measures of "wealth" are misleading in a subtle way. The way articles like this and most popular media portrays it, people like Jeff Bezos are wealthy because they are hoarding money that they somehow extracted from the productive economy and diverted to their use by nefarious means. Like fairy tale dragons perched on their pile of gold and treasure at the top of a mountain, lording it over the…

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Re: You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth

#30

Post by thefaux »

iandanforth wrote: post #25
grajaganDev wrote: post #9

LA fires destroyed 17000 houses. Roughly average value: $3 million each. That is $51 billion by my calculation. Musk is worth $400 billion.

$430B according to Forbes real time billionaires list. Nitpicky? Yes. But it's $30 billion dollars.

Yes and these numbers are kind of meaningless approximations beyond the order of magnitude anyway.
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