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What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

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Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#51

Post by lurk2 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #19

What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example. Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

I was sure your numbers were wrong but if we assume $200,000 in your sleep means $600,000 a day, that’s $219,000,000 per year.

Bezos has an estimated 220,000,000,000 dollars as of May 2025. $220,000,000,000 per year / $219,000,000 per year = 1004.6 years. Wild.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#53

Post by mostertoaster »

stephen_g wrote: post #39
taf2 wrote: post #18

Now add the US debt!

If you're looking at a billion dollars you're looking at all kinds of debt, including US bonds. Much of what gives money value is the existence of debt (another thing is the obligation of taxation). Always has been, which is why trying to tie currencies to values of commodities or precious metals has always collapsed eventually...

It is likely more than just coincidence that the wealth gap increased so much as soon as we went off the gold standard in the 70s.

Might’ve been worth it if we all are ultimately wealthier than we would’ve been, but also easy to think it just become a way for the rich to soak the middle class with a hidden tax, that the proletariat applauds and votes in favor of with only short term thinking.

We get that middle class to be much less than 50% of the populace, as long as they give us EBT, and some money for healthcare and maybe once the mega corporations own most the property they give us some box to call shelter, the entire middle class will just become be good little subservient serfs, happy that our noble lords take so good care of us.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#55

Post by JadeNB »

anonym29 wrote: post #47
climb_stealth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mindboggling, thank you. Right on that note is one of my favourite tweets on the internet: > Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?

Obviously he isn't working 130 billion times harder, but he may be some combination of 130 billion times as much (privileged upbringing × strategically focused × economically impactful × smarter × harder working × luckier × n other relevant factors) than the typical American, that I can seriously consider. I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definiti…

> I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definition for "fair share" to mean everyone pays the same amount of direct cash transfer into the system and gets the same amount of direct cash receipt out of the system.

Pays to whom? Verifying this claim seems to require a definition of "the system." If you literally mean all money expenditure, then almost certainly this is literally true. But it's not obvious to me that the expenditure on, for example, Bezos' vanity space trip benefited "the system" more than someone spending a much smaller amount, but dispersed more widely through the community. Or, if it did, it's not obvious to me that the additional benefit was in any reasonable proportion to the additional expenditure.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#56

Post by WalterBright »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #19

What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example. Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

A friend of mine, after a ski accident, looked for a knee rehab place. The one he found was patronized by pro athletes. He said they worked out like mad. He asked them why, and they said that if they didn't get back in shape, the $$$$ gravy train for them was over.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#58

Post by Paracompact »

anonym29 wrote: post #47
climb_stealth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mindboggling, thank you. Right on that note is one of my favourite tweets on the internet: > Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?

Obviously he isn't working 130 billion times harder, but he may be some combination of 130 billion times as much (privileged upbringing × strategically focused × economically impactful × smarter × harder working × luckier × n other relevant factors) than the typical American, that I can seriously consider. I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definiti…

> I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definition for "fair share" to mean everyone pays the same amount of direct cash transfer into the system and gets the same amount of direct cash receipt out of the system.

I appreciate the clarity, but this is a bizarre definition of fair share. Do you really believe that everyone gets the same amount of usage from, and contributes to the same amount of wear and tear on, municipal and infrastructural resources? Do you believe that industrialists do not ravage the earth and society while chasing profits? These externalities measure in the billions (when they can even be quantified at all) for players like Amazon.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#59

Post by WalterBright »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #19

What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example. Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

> Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

If they would invest the money, they would accrue exponentially more money. Most seem to just spend the money on silly stuff, and wind up with nothing (according to an ESPN documentary on it).

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#60

Post by syockit »

nsxwolf wrote: post #40

Now stack them into cubes and it looks way smaller.

It's really unintuitive how a mere increase in number of dimensions could totally change the scale of things. This is the crux of the curse of dimensionality in machine learning. If you simply stacked it high, it may almost reach the sun (but no quite), but once you lay it into roughly a square (20000 x 50000), it spans only over a mile per side. To lay it roughly into a cube of 100 dollar stacks, you'd have something like 65 x 150 x 1026, which turns out to be about only 12 yards per side.

EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.

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