r/AskReddit • u/Previous-Ad3911 • 7d ago

You can have 5000 of anything that starts with Y. What do you choose?

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u/ismelldirti 7d ago

Years worth of income

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u/duhogman 7d ago

If you made $100k per year that would put you at half way to being a billionaire. Kinda hurts to put that into perspective.

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u/vkapadia 7d 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.

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u/dcdesmond 6d ago

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.