What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

Let's have some fun. $600,000/per day, with an annual investment return of 7%, reaches $220b in 64 years, not 1004.

    import core.stdc.stdio;

    void main() {
    double wealth = 0;
    double pay = 600_000 * 365;
    double api = .07;
    for (int year = 0; ++year;)
    {
        wealth = wealth * 1.07 + pay;
        if (wealth >= 222_000_000_000.0)
        {
            printf("year = %d\n", year);
            break;
        }
    }
    }

Except for some extremists, I don't think the advice is to save and invest everything. Instead, you should try to be saving and investing a meaningful amount of your income.

> consider the individual buying power of a billionaire

This is what I never understand about posts like this. The buying power of an individual for their own selfish purposes becomes meaningless at a surprisingly low number. One billion cannot even be spent as one or a few transactions.

This visualization worked for me: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-art...

$1 million in $100 bills can be -tightly- packed into a standard briefcase.

$1 billion in $100 bills is ten 4-foot high pallets.

$1 trillion, 10000 of those pallets, covers a US football-field sized area.

When you understand the extreme inequality; that most people don't have $100K and some people have billions, and you understand how the monetary system works to compound the billions, it puts into perspective how the system functions.

If the system seems like it's about 'value creation' it's only because billionaires let it be that way. With that kind of money, you can probably run the whole system however you want.

That kind of money cannot buy that many goods and services without causing hyperinflation... What can that money be used for? Business asset acquisitions, luxury real estate, fine art and political manipulations... Either way they're getting marginal benefits out of it; the asset valuations are likely inflated by billionaires' own wealth competing against one another. Ultimately, once that level of wealth is reached, the whole market becomes about political influence... And even this can cause inflation; but this kind of inflation can be offset by oppression; you can use money to incentivize people to control each other in a hierarchy.

In such society, as a regular person, you need to pick a billionaire tribe because the money flows top-down. If you're not in any billionaire tribe, what will happen is everyone else who is will be getting paid but you won't be getting paid. This is sad because the truth (about various things) is often a middle-ground between different billionaire perspectives or sometimes it's diametrically opposed to any billionaire's perspective. It's already a kind of monarchy, fueled by fiat money creation.