So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:
Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?
This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.
Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?
This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.
Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:
This is an
Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.
How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.
Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.
But we’re not done yet.
The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?
Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.
The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.
And to top it all off, a fleet of five
Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.
If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.
But we’re not done yet.
Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.
This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.
In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.
So yeah, make of that what you will.
1 YEAR UPDATE
So it’s been just a little bit over a year since I’ve made this post, and holy shit I didn’t expect it to get so many notes… anyway thought I’d make an update. First, a few responses to common criticisms I noticed:
“That house costs more than you said it costs”
I provided sources for everything, I can’t click on the links for you broski.
“The map of Russia is incorrect”
Strange, my bad… didn’t notice until after I posted that the map I used includes Belarus and a few other countries as part of Russia, no idea why they did that, I should have picked a better map.
“Net worth somehow doesn’t count as worth because not all of it is literal stacks of cash”
First of all I distinctly specified that my figures were based on if said billionaires liquidated their assets, but more importantly that’s like sitting on top of a pile of solid gold bars and claiming you’re totally broke because you can’t use them at the supermarket. Seriously, this is just asinine.
*Insert impassioned defense of capitalism here*
Now if you follow my blog it’s pretty obvious that I’m a leftist, but something I did very deliberately for my billionaire essay was try to avoid ever mentioning left politics or making any moral judgements, i.e. more or less everything I wrote in that post was just objective, inarguable facts. I very intentionally ended the essay with “make of that what you will,” without ever actually commenting on whether the situation was good or bad. If you consider yourself a capitalist and want to remain consistent with reality, you really shouldn’t be offended by this post. If your first response upon looking at a neutral series of data points is to immediately rush to defend the system that produced it, it means you instinctually realize something is terribly wrong and you’re trying to justify it. Just saying, not a good position to be arguing from.
ANYWAY
As of the time of this update, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world; the title now belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with with a mind-blowing $147.7 billion. Now, what could he actually do with all of that? Let’s make a list!
End Homelessness in America
There are an estimated 553,742 homeless people in America. Jeff Bezos could hand every single one of them $50,000 cash for
$27,687,100,000, which should be more than enough to get a roof over your head for a decent amount of time.
Give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard
Going to Harvard University will cost a student about 60,659 a year including tuition, room and board, and various other fees. Paying for a full 4 years for 100,000 students would cost
$24,263,600,000.
Buy Iceland for a year
The gross domestic product of Iceland is currently about $23.9 billion dollars, which means for that amount Jeff Bezos could buy every single product and service produced in the country for an entire year.
Fund every US national park for 10 years
This year’s budget for the national park service will probably be about $2.7 billion, so 10 years of funding would be $27 billion.
Give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus
Jeff Bezos has
563,100 employees working for Amazon. He could give each and every one of them a $20,000 bonus for $
11,262,000,000.
End world hunger
It would probably cost around $30 billion to ensure that no person in the entire world suffered starvation and malnourishment this year.
And how much does Jeff have left?
After doing all of that, Bezos would still have upwards of $3.5 billion left over, which is not only far, far more money than a single person could ever spend on themselves, it also would mean he still gets to remain substantially richer than most other billionaires.
Funny world we live in.
Hey! Fun reminder to fucking eat the rich!
when is the revolution starting??? this is getting ridiculous
Ya ever feel like the ideal body type for women was inherently just classism and the perfect way to treat women like trophies because like back when women were Thick™ as an ideal body type the only women who were able to look like that were the rich and today now the type is super thin and the only women who can look like that are the women who don’t work labour jobs and can afford not to have a carb diet so basically men only go for rich women and have changed how they objectify women not because of some biological quirk that shifts their lust but entirely because the form of the most privileged women has changed therefore the best trophy to keep
It literally was. Fat was hype when malnutrition and starvation were common. A symbol of leisure.
Gucci Skinny was hype when malnutrition from cheap food was common and when most of the middle class had desk jobs. Symbol of control over women who now had more rights.
Instagram Fit ™ is hype because most people are overworked and too broke to exercise or eat properly. A symbol of “leisure” and wealth.
one of those “everybody in the country/world gets institutionally divided into extremely specific groups” style dystopian young adult novels but the groups are like, clowns, pro wrestlers, furries, and business ceos
PLEASE imagine being the person in line behind percy when he tried to put a fucking sand dollar into the vending machineat school
I just love how this also implies that when Percy Jackson was given a profound gift of currency from his father, a literal god, with the ominous statement that ‘he would know when to spend it’, he figured that a fucking snack from his high school vending machine was worth it.
she wasn’t initially, she was just a normal comic book character.
there was no anime stylization.
she was just japanese and living in america and had a mech.
the problem is they took a character who was japanese and was like “oh japanese huh? let’s make her super ~kawaii and anime uwu~ instead of like, an actual character with substance.”
that’s what i’m angry about.
like her original character was a parody of mech manga and stuff but it was done respectfully and not …. like this.
i still love spiderverse and i think it’s a great movie but i just wish that when it came to its two asian characters (peni and ganke) it provided a more positive representation rather than…….anime tropes and complete irrelevancy.
Honestly, like, mood.
I didn’t hate Peni I’m the movie but I felt like the “light” racism was not great and they also just completely missed her character whose supposed to be a kinda “angsts” and battle/tragedy hardened bc her parents died(and her uncle or aunt can’t remember which but in her second comic one of them died
she’s only had two comics abt her alone ;-;)
and like she’s made by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance so what do you expect and very little of that comes through in the movie.
The original mech design is sooo much better and it just hurts that such a cool character probably won’t ever get the adaption she/her mech deserves
