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).
It's not about how hard they work, it's about how much value they provide, or the worth of the assets they own if they sell all of their assets without a price crash
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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
$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.
I always thought one of the biggest problems with modern education is not spending enough time teaching people about interest rates/return on investment. If everyone just understood what you're pointing out here--just really "got it"--I feel like the world would be in a much better place. It's not dire (I don't think?), and I know we've come a very long way, but, man, it could be so much better.
Maybe. A lot of these calculations are usually based on historical averages for the US stock market. For the economy to keep moving, they need people to spend their money.
Eventually it may all even out, where people spend so much once they hit a certain point in their life/portfolio, that it allows for everyone else to be saving and investing everything in the first few decades of life. But a transition period where everyone stops their mindless consumerism would be rough on markets. Sales of “wants” would collapse and the stocks would fall right with them. At least that’s my theory.
I also often wonder if the stock performance we’ve seen is simply a result of the way the population has grown. If we are seeing slowing growth, or even population decline, can we expect the markets to contract right a long with the population. What will that mean for everyone’s retirement accounts?
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.
I appreciate what you're saying here, all of it, and wonder some of the same, but my comment was likely overly cryptic because I didn't mean anything about consumption.
"The average American household spent $87,432 in 2021." That number seems awfully high to me? That's more than I am seeing the average household makes in 2023.
This visualization is wildly inaccurate. The supposed 1000 pixels are actually 100x100 pixels, which is 10,000 not 1000. Secondly, on many screens they are not actually pixels. For example, on a macbook pro you're likely seeing 40,000 pixels in actuality.
This made me do a search on the missing Iraqi billions, as I remember there were details at the time how it was packaged in pallets and flown into the country. Couldn't find that, but according to The Guardian [0]:
> Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash.
> consider the individual buying power of a billionaire
This is what I never understand about posts like this. The buying power of an individual for their own selfish purposes becomes meaningless at a surprisingly low number. One billion cannot even be spent as one or a few transactions.
It's really unintuitive how a mere increase in number of dimensions could totally change the scale of things. This is the crux of the curse of dimensionality in machine learning. If you simply stacked it high, it may almost reach the sun (but no quite), but once you lay it into roughly a square (20000 x 50000), it spans only over a mile per side. To lay it roughly into a cube of 100 dollar stacks, you'd have something like 65 x 150 x 1026, which turns out to be about only 12 yards per side.
EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.
This is a good reference for the next time yet another security company goes for $XX,000,000,000 and the buyer says "because that's how much they're worth"
When I try to zoom in (by pinching the touchpad) on one of the charts at the bottom of the site, Firefox crashes. I guess there are too many pixels in the black bar :)
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.
In Australia, a million dollars (US or AUD, doesn't matter) is a deposit on a nice home.
My former boss just sold his business and become a multi-millionaire. He'll have to go back into the workforce to be able to afford a decent -- but not palatial -- home in a nice suburb.
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
Did you actually scroll to the bottom or got bored while scrolling and scrolling and scrolling on the big black box running "top to bottom"?
The whole thing is about perspective. The big black box is just the start.
I find it much more enlightening to think about all the pixels I had to scroll past, then seeing the same thing represented by a big and then small black circle and put it in perspective with things like people working minimum wage all their lives all the way up to the Bezos and Musks of the world.
Those relative sizes feel immediately "relatable" even though they're "just numbers".
On the other hand I find your examples (no offense intended) lack that.
This is a house (or palace rather) that you could buy for $1B
This is very area specific. I can buy the same house / palace for way less than a billion in one place vs. another.
This is an oceanic yacht of the same value
From a quick Google, most super yachts "in that price range" cost less than 0.5 billion. Not that this makes it any more relatable.
This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build
Seems like the house thing above :shrug:
This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B
Refineries always just look huge to me. Whether they cost $1B or $100,000,000 I really couldn't tell you. It's just a huge place of tubes and stuff. I have no frame of reference so to speak.
This is how many US senators you can bribe, and how many favorable bills you can push through Congress /s
Lacking frame of reference as well, though yeah, the /s was worth thinking about this one. Maybe the original site could represent this as a number or relatively sized circles. "This is how many bills you could buy with this in 1975 vs. 2000 vs. 2025" /s
But then it'd really be about inflation instead of perspective.
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).
> Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?
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.
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.
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.
I think the sportsman case is actually harder to accept for most people - “how can someone that ‘just’ kicks a ball around earn $200k sleeping?!”
Warren Buffet was famously quoted saying it was otrageous' his Secretary Pays 2x's his Tax rate.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg
The length of one million USD is about the distance of a US football field or UK football pitch (which he demonstrates walking in a parking lot).
The length of one billion USD is driving over an hour at a speed of 100 kph (55 mph), the rest of the video.
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.
Eventually it may all even out, where people spend so much once they hit a certain point in their life/portfolio, that it allows for everyone else to be saving and investing everything in the first few decades of life. But a transition period where everyone stops their mindless consumerism would be rough on markets. Sales of “wants” would collapse and the stocks would fall right with them. At least that’s my theory.
I also often wonder if the stock performance we’ve seen is simply a result of the way the population has grown. If we are seeing slowing growth, or even population decline, can we expect the markets to contract right a long with the population. What will that mean for everyone’s retirement accounts?
1 billion seconds -> 31.5 years
For a real answer, I’d assume retired people earn 0 but still spend? So that could change the math
> Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq
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.
(I originally posted $300 billion which is a number I heard recently but then realized that couldn't be right).
Reminds "Something for Nothing" by Sheckley.
EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.
It's all bullshit valuation after $500,000,000.
MacBook M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, Firefox 141.0
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.
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."
My former boss just sold his business and become a multi-millionaire. He'll have to go back into the workforce to be able to afford a decent -- but not palatial -- home in a nice suburb.
- 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.
Raw materials + labor + debt financing + geographical point-in-time land value? It'd be easier to intuit these vs look at some nice pixels?
It’s a little old so inflation is a factor, but still really good intuition
The whole thing is about perspective. The big black box is just the start.
I find it much more enlightening to think about all the pixels I had to scroll past, then seeing the same thing represented by a big and then small black circle and put it in perspective with things like people working minimum wage all their lives all the way up to the Bezos and Musks of the world.
Those relative sizes feel immediately "relatable" even though they're "just numbers".
On the other hand I find your examples (no offense intended) lack that.
This is very area specific. I can buy the same house / palace for way less than a billion in one place vs. another. From a quick Google, most super yachts "in that price range" cost less than 0.5 billion. Not that this makes it any more relatable. Seems like the house thing above :shrug: Refineries always just look huge to me. Whether they cost $1B or $100,000,000 I really couldn't tell you. It's just a huge place of tubes and stuff. I have no frame of reference so to speak. Lacking frame of reference as well, though yeah, the /s was worth thinking about this one. Maybe the original site could represent this as a number or relatively sized circles. "This is how many bills you could buy with this in 1975 vs. 2000 vs. 2025" /sBut then it'd really be about inflation instead of perspective.