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What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

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Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#3
$1 billion dollars looks like $20-$35 million dollars a year of indefinite spending, inflation adjusting, depending on the exact form of the billion dollars and the tax rates involved.

So, spending 100% of the after tax income of like 75 (well paid!) staff engineers at a big tech company in CA, but without having any job.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#8
I find this visualization pretty useless. What I would appreciate is putting billion of dollars in terms of actual property you could buy with it, something like:

- This is a house (or palace rather) that you could buy for $1B

- This is an oceanic yacht of the same value

- This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build

- This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B

- This is how many US senators you can bribe, and how many favorable bills you can push through Congress /s

etc.

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#9
post #8

I find this visualization pretty useless. What I would appreciate is putting billion of dollars in terms of actual property you could buy with it, something like: - This is a house (or palace rather) that you could buy for $1B - This is an oceanic yacht of the same value - This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build - This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B - This is how many US senators you…

There’s a xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/980/

It’s a little old so inflation is a factor, but still really good intuition

Re: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

#10
Presenter: "With a million dollars, you can own a nice home."

Presenter: "With two million dollars, you can own two nice homes."

Presenter: "With three mil--"

Audience: "Wait, who owns two nice homes, when so many people don't have any? Why is that even legal?"

Presenter: "Please, no interruptions; I have a lot more counting to do."

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