Another way to see the huge difference between $1m and $1b:
Let's say you made $1/second (which is an insanely good salary, $3600/hr), and you earned this not just business hours, but 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Earning $1m would take you less than 12 days. Earning $1b would take you over 31 years.
The average giraffe is about 4.44 meters long. Expressed in millimeters, a half giraffe as a unit of measurement would be 2,220 millimeters. So I guess a half giraffe is like... 2.22 meters or 2.22 billionaires. So a millionaire is 1/2220 half giraffes.
A million cats would probably be enough to take over your neighborhood. A billion cats would be enough to form a furry, meowing carpet that could blanket an entire small country.
I like this example. And OP said 5000 years worth of income. $100K is above average. 5000 years of above average income only takes you halfway up the meterstick. And the top 10 billionaires in the world are all worth over $100B, which means that their worth is over 100 m high, or roughly a 30 story building.
5000 years of above average wealth, measured in Millions of dollars per mm, only takes you to about the height of your knees, while the world's richest individuals are looking down at you from the tops of 30 story buildings.
Imagine something one inch in size which costs sixteen thousand dollars. Holy crap that's expensive! That's in ultra-custom-jewelry territory! In some jobs that's an annual salary!
This is entirely nonsense, though. $1,000 is NOT a lot of money, and if that was your entire net worth, you would absolutely not be squandering single dollars like you do when your net worth is many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Think about someone who earns $100,000 a year (let alone that it's their entire net worth). Do you think they just spend $100 like its meaningless?
If your net worth is a billion dollars, saying "a million dollar is a rounding error" depends very much on the context of that million dollars. Are you talking about earning $1m? Or spending $1m? Is it a one-time purchase? Or something you are suggesting they spend regularly? What are they spending it on?
Someone who earns $100,000 presumably doesn't balk at going out to a restaurant and spending $100 once in a while, but they don't necessarily do it every day. they might not bat an eye at their income going up or down $100 a year, but they may or may not think twice about spending $100 on a concert or sports ticket.
To a billionaire, a thousand dollars is a "rounding error". Ten thousand dollars is a "rounding error". I wouldn't say the same about a million dollars. A hundred thousand is probably in border territory.
if that was your entire net worth, you would absolutely not be squandering single dollars like you do when your net worth is many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There's validity to that logic, but I still don't think that a billionaire looks at a million dollars like it's nothing. Hundred thousand? Maybe. But a million? You still can only blow (or not blow - just spend) a million dollars a thousand times before you have blown a million dollars. In the long run, that's not THAT many times, if you are frivolous with money as much as "rounding error" can make it sound like you are.
Edit: I'm not saying they can't afford to spend or donate or blow $1m... but they can't afford to do that all the time like comparing it to pocket change of $1 suggests. Many people of typical incomes consider that amount so frivolous, they spend 5x that amount daily on a coffee. I don't think billionaires look at/spend millions as casually as we non-billionaires look at coffee money. I mean, I'm sure there are a few that do, but doubt that is common.
This is why I laugh at the bootlickers who cry that raising taxes on the rich would be "punishing success". If you just take away 99% of a billionaire's assets, he's still got ten million bucks. There's no appreciable effect on their quality of life, even after losing statistically everything.
Um... you know that if all the owners disappeared tomorrow, the workers could still go to work and make products, right? They'd just be doing it for themselves and their communities instead of some rich asshole.
My wife is a corporate tax accountant, her responsibility is calculating how much her company owes in sales tax for purchases. I remember just a few years ago when she started auditing her old company's tax liability they hounded her to find every single nickel and dime of possible savings because it was a relatively small company. Still large but small enough. Now she's at a multinational company. She was going over taxes for some purchase earlier this year and managed to get their total liability down to $1.2 million, but she had a discrepancy of $15k that she was pouring over trying to get to zero and her boss was like "and? Just pay it. It's only $15k."
I have no idea what her company does but she comes home some days and is like I just had to pay $10 million in taxes. Not a $10mil purchase, the sales tax was $10 million. And that was after she was able to bring it down using various magic witch tricks to find tax discounts. I know enough about tax to know I hate it.
A billionaire is waiting in line to check in to his Vegas hotel while some guy in a nice suit paired with a pristine Stetson is making a stink about his room to the receptionist. Billionaire asks if he can just go ahead and get his key real quick since this obviously isn't going to be over any time soon.
"Cowboy" yells, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I'M WORTH 12 MILLION DOLLARS!!!" Billionaire sizes him up for about 3 seconds.
"The difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her." - Relevant xkcd
To put another way, you could have earned $3.33 every single second since the year 1AD, and still be worth less than Elon Musk is worth today. ($212b vs $213b)
That is $31.5 million a year, invested into the S&P 500 every single year with dividends reinvested, at an average rate of return of 10%, would net you $6.3 billion at the end of 31 years.
Keep the scale going…1 trillion dollars at $1 per second would take you 32,000 years. Longer than the human record (and some billionaires are on their way to this number)
I was just thinking about this the other day. With 7 trillion dollar budget, which is projected for 2025, it would take something like 0.01% to end homelessness. At market rate rent.
205 people in America who earn more than $50 million a year in wages alone.Oct 22, 2018
It would take them 20 years to make $1B through wages alone at 50M/yr. I'll guess that number hasn't gone up much, since compensation in stock is far better than simple cash in these situations.
Worse yet, if you made $1/second 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, it would take roughly 6,700 years to accumulate Elon Musk’s net worth… or approximately $1 per second since 1,500 years before ancient Egypt arose
During bill gates higher earning years if he dropped a check worth $1,000 on the sidewalk it was not worth his time to stop and pick it up. This assumed working 14 hours per day and dividing his income out. And this isn't even using his highest income levels.
My favorite thing is to extend this to a trillion dollars. Keeping the rate of $1/second, continuously, a trillion seconds is about 31,710 years.
For context, to have a trillion dollars at this rate, you would've had to begin earning money about 20,000 years before the end of the Pleistocene era (you know, back when cavemen were chasing wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers), well before the emergence of the first human civilizations in Mesopotamia.
So when someone talks about a trillion dollar company or a national budget, keep this frame of reference in mind.
This was the way that was explained to me that broke my brain too. To add to it -- a trillion is 31,000 years lol, and the US has almost 35 trillion in debt.
Of course not, but it contextualizes how much that really is. Most people see million / billion / trillion and just think big number and don't really realize how significantly different they all are. A million is a drop in the bucket to a billion, and a billion is a drop in the bucket to a trillion.
I remember when this was told a few years ago, and it was like, “A million seconds ago? Less than twelve days ago. A billion seconds ago? The Soviet Union was still intact.
The most impactful dumbing down of this immense difference that I’ve seen, which put it all into perspective for me as an average person was this: Take a $1 bill. Now imagine this single dollar is worth $100. A person who possesses a million dollars would have 10,000 of these. A person who possesses a billion would have 10,000,000 of them. For some reason this illustration just killed me. I think it’s because $1 means a little something to me in my day-to-day. And I feel like an idiot if I impulsively spend $100 on something or lose it somehow or get shorted that on a paycheck… It is totally fucked that we have any billionaires. My buddy always says, “If you make a billion dollars you should just get a trophy that says, ‘Congratulations, you won Capitalism!’ and then you just stop earning money and it goes somewhere else because no single person or family needs or deserves that much money.
I've been told before that the difference is that a million seconds is 12 days and a billion seconds is 31 years and some, which is exactly what you said just a lil simplified.
This is exactly what I did to explain to my mom the billion-second birthday party I was throwing, lol. I told her I was approaching 1 billion seconds old and I wanted to host a party to celebrate. She was surprised that one billion seconds is 31~ years, but she said she and my dad would come.
I wanted to cook something that could help visually represent a billion, so I calculated a how much one billion grains of rice was just for laughs... it's roughly 71.5 tons of rice. To put it another way, once cooked, it would serve one cup of cooked rice each to 1,430,000 people. There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, and each has its own stadium. Each stadium has an average of 42,675 seats. If every seat of every stadium was full at the same time, one billion grains of rice could serve every single person one cup, and then you would still have 200,000 servings left.
I ended up serving paella and told everyone that each grain of rice represented about 2.5 hours of time I've been kicking it around here on Earth. It's such a wild concept, thinking of it like that! Just looking at a tablespoon of cooked rice which has about 100 grains, that's the equivalent of 250 hours, or about 10.5 days.... which is about 1 million seconds. One million is to one billion what one spoon of rice is to a whole pot of paella.
The dinner party was so much fun. My mom made a cake and got number candles for 1,000,000,000! 🥰
Yeah that would be a fun milestone to plan! We're gonna be doing that for my mom in October. It's about 63 years 4 months. Funny thing is my nephew was born shortly after my billion so we celebrated his million at about 12 days old, made a cake and everything haha.
I've always tried to tell this to people, but just as time. That a million seconds is 12 days and a billion is 31 years. Sometimes it's hard for them to understand but when it clicks it really puts in perspective.
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u/vkapadia 5d ago
Scale is a hell of a thing.
Another way to see the huge difference between $1m and $1b:
Let's say you made $1/second (which is an insanely good salary, $3600/hr), and you earned this not just business hours, but 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Earning $1m would take you less than 12 days. Earning $1b would take you over 31 years.