What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?(whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website) |
What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?(whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website) |
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.
It’s a little old so inflation is a factor, but still really good intuition
Raw materials + labor + debt financing + geographical point-in-time land value? It'd be easier to intuit these vs look at some nice pixels?
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 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
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.
> Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?
It really is an important clarification. I have worked at startups where the founders worked several times harder than I did and they ended up with $0 and one of them in debt.
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.
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.
import core.stdc.stdio;
void main() {
double wealth = 0;
double pay = 600_000 * 365;
double api = .07;
for (int year = 0; ++year;)
{
wealth = wealth * 1.07 + pay;
if (wealth >= 222_000_000_000.0)
{
printf("year = %d\n", year);
break;
}
}
}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...
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).
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.
* 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.
1 billion seconds -> 31.5 years
> Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash.
A happy find is an exhibition catalogue on the theme of the numinous pre- and post-photography:
Clair, Jean. Cosmos from Goya to De Chirico, from Friedrich to Kiefer: art in pursuit of the infinite (2000)
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19133047W/Cosmos?edition=key...
For a real answer, I’d assume retired people earn 0 but still spend? So that could change the math
For the average, Jeff bezos is pulling it up.
$1 million in $100 bills can be -tightly- packed into a standard briefcase.
$1 billion in $100 bills is ten 4-foot high pallets.
$1 trillion, 10000 of those pallets, covers a US football-field sized area.
Reminds "Something for Nothing" by Sheckley.
If the system seems like it's about 'value creation' it's only because billionaires let it be that way. With that kind of money, you can probably run the whole system however you want.
That kind of money cannot buy that many goods and services without causing hyperinflation... What can that money be used for? Business asset acquisitions, luxury real estate, fine art and political manipulations... Either way they're getting marginal benefits out of it; the asset valuations are likely inflated by billionaires' own wealth competing against one another. Ultimately, once that level of wealth is reached, the whole market becomes about political influence... And even this can cause inflation; but this kind of inflation can be offset by oppression; you can use money to incentivize people to control each other in a hierarchy.
In such society, as a regular person, you need to pick a billionaire tribe because the money flows top-down. If you're not in any billionaire tribe, what will happen is everyone else who is will be getting paid but you won't be getting paid. This is sad because the truth (about various things) is often a middle-ground between different billionaire perspectives or sometimes it's diametrically opposed to any billionaire's perspective. It's already a kind of monarchy, fueled by fiat money creation.
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.
Almost all of those are part of running a business. In the case of bribes, nobody would ever go along with it if it was only one person impacted.
(I originally posted $300 billion which is a number I heard recently but then realized that couldn't be right).
MacBook M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, Firefox 141.0
It's all bullshit valuation after $500,000,000.
EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.
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?
Maybe, but it also is predicated on a market like today's market, where the average American saves approximately zero dollars and has to work until social security.
If everyone saved a lot, you'd get a different situation. Probably a better situation, but it'd definitely be different.
Shit, the bigger scarier one is housing and ss. A huge percentage of people's retirement is either directly in housing (i.e. their house is their only asset), or indirectly in housing via their (mbs or other mortgage related bond products). If population declines housing prices may crater, and if population declines ss payouts may also crater. Gonna be a rough period of time (decades?).
7% annual compounding is a decent floor, but it's an iron law that sophisticated investors can't outperform. AMZN is has certainly compounded much faster than 7% per year over the last two decades, and access to that investment was democratized the entire time.
Wealth isn't morality, being wealthy isn't a sin, and wealthy people's offspring have no burden of justification to "deserve" their wealth.
Insisting otherwise is a direct attack on the fundamental right to private property that underpins western civilization.
When the US government provides the same equal protection to all citizens, including those who contribute nothing but violence and suffering to everyone around them at the expense of taxpayers, what horrific atrocity are Jeff Bezos' children of that warrants confiscation of millions or billions of lawfully and voluntarily acquired wealth?
That's not the point at all. You cannot catch up with anyone who is ahead of you and you follow the same investment protocol.
> What did Jeff Bezos’ children do that would warrant their wealth?
Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.
Further, consided that the top 10% are responsible for half of all consumer spending, and the bottom 50% combined control just 2.5% of all assets. The bottom 60% ceasimg all spending would barely even move the needle, they're insignificant in the macro picture.
You are also making assumptions about my portfolio makeup, chiefly regarding long exposure to US equities that are primarily or substantially beneficiaries of consumer spending. This is not true for me personally, and moreover, there is plenty of money to be made in markets with or without tiny consumer spending blips.
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.
Taxes paid to governments. "The system" being governments - federal, state, county, city/locality.
Cash receipts out of the system would include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, WIC/SNAP, cell phone vouchers, housing vouchers, transportation vouchers, SSI/SSDI, and even all tax credits (including indirect tax credits, like Elon Musk receiving a tiny percentage of total Tesla profits, which are themselves a non-100% percentage of vehicles sold, which are themselves purchased overwhelmingly with customer money that does not come from tax credits, of the percentage of cars sold that are even eligible for tax credits).
And yes, I do count those slivers of indirect EV tax credits as receipts for Musk, however significantly those dollars are diluted before they reach Musk, and count them against his contributions (which include the highest individual income tax bill ever paid by anyone in history).
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.
No, I do not believe that, but it's worth noting that taxing income has no direct relationship to usage-based taxation of public resources. There are people who pay millions in income taxes while making negligible use of roads, and there are net tax recipients who contribute no net taxes at all driving 40-ton 18-wheelers inflicting vastly more damage to roadways than 99% of people. If we want to tax externality costs, we should tax externality costs, not income.
>Do you believe that industrialists do not ravage the earth and society while chasing profits?
Regarding externality costs: see above. Income and externality costs are not the same, nor are they necessarily closely correlated.
Lacking that utopia, we have to estimate. You say income taxes are an unfair mechanism; what do you think is fairer?
Agreed, though in this thread I don't think we're speculating about just having an emergency fund, but rather going and investing a decent chunk of income going forward. Closer to China savings rate than US savings rate, for example.
I personally think it would be great if people saved more, even if it means a current small-ish percentage no longer have the ability to live off of investments without working.
> Further, consided that the top 10% are responsible for half of all consumer spending, and the bottom 50% combined control just 2.5% of all assets. The bottom 60% ceasimg all spending would barely even move the needle, they're insignificant in the macro picture.
The bottom 50% certainly spends on food, rent, etc.
If you look at the consumer market in places (like China) with much higher savings rate, there are definitely difficulties with trying a US style approach of financial independence from purely stock investments and withdrawing a sizeable 3%+ per year.
> You are also making assumptions about my portfolio makeup,
Sorry I didn't mean you specifically, I mean the royal you as in the average person in the US. Who, if they're gonna invest, are gonna be probably at least 60% in US equities.
Certainly any random specific individual can make a portfolio resistant to whatever edge case. If you go 100% crypto, maybe you make out like gangbusters if people spend less. If you go 0% crypto, maybe you make out like gangbusters if crypto totally crashes. Etc etc.
Taxes are a disincentive - this is why we tax vices.
We want to disincentivize rampant, mindless consumerism that fuels the externality costs, right?
Tax buying things - any things - all things - much heavier, tax the act of working to earn an income to survive much less.
Want to buy a car? Pay a big tax. Want to work hard to earn money to pay your bills and feed your family? Shouldn't be taxed for that.
Those who didn't have no justification to complain about it.
I'm rather angry with myself for not investing in Nvidia.
No one does. The issue comes when they start using that money to acquire political power. He wasn’t joking about seeing your margin as his opportunity.
> Insisting otherwise is a direct attack on the fundamental right to private property that underpins western civilization.
Western civilization includes a history of taxation, expropriation, and probate fees. No amount of libertarian revisionism will change this.
Buying elections doesn't work if the voters just don't like you.
This is true and a major critique of capitalist growth economics; it privileges those who were born into wealth and those who were simply born earlier than others. To an extent, this is natural. An elder in a tribe of hunter gatherers will necessarily possess more knowledge than an infant, but no one would seriously suggest that this kind of inequality could be done away with. The issue is when that advantage compounds exponentially year over year. If it just stopped there we could all get rich and live with robot butlers, but the general tendency in these kinds of scenarios is for the new money to take control of the political process via media influence, bribery, or force, and to use political power to acquire further wealth, not via competition and creative destruction, but by monopoly (I would argue a lot of the tech giants are technically already here).
As a long-time and well-regarded member of this forum, I assume you are familiar with Peter Thiel. Thiel and a number of his affiliates have been funding political influencers for the last ten or so years. JD Vance and Blake Masters both came out of Thiel’s camp. The goal here is ultimately not to remain agents of competitive market capitalism, but to seize control of the political process. There’s an argument to be made that the world would be better off with the political process being under the control of technologists than the various democratic mafias that comprise post-national states, but I don’t think it’s a very compelling one. First, it undermines the entire premise that capitalism as a social arrangement enfranchises everyone via the market (if this were true, political power would be superfluous). Second, we are talking about the people who gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2005) and then gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2025); they have a proven track record of making things drastically worse than when they started.
The whole critique of capitalism (which is not necessarily a critique of markets in and of themselves) is that exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors who then undermine the entire system to benefit themselves.
> Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.
Bezos will be dead by then. The question then follows: Why should we respect the wishes of dead men, when there is no obvious social benefit to respecting these wishes? There is a feasible (if contentious) argument that Bezos “created” and thus “deserves” his wealth, but it seems undeniable that his children did not earn it, so the only justification we have left is a dead man’s wishes. It may be that the social benefits of inheritance are greater than the potential benefits of confiscation (dividing Bezos’ wealth would only yield about $31 per person). I have reservations about both theories; I’m just presenting them as well as I understand them.
BTW, the federal estate tax is 40% and the Washington estate tax is 37%. That's 77%. How much more do you want?
Provision is not a problem in and of itself; it’s the scale at which it is occurring. I know from your posts that capital accumulation is an issue you’ve thought a lot about, and I’m sure you’re smarter than I’ll ever be, but I feel strongly that you’d change your mind on this if you spent some time reading about late Roman, medieval, and early modern economies. I was a libertarian for many years prior to looking at the dynamics of wealth accumulation that occurred during these periods and how societies came up with new ways to navigate them. I will admit I never came up with a cohesive moral theory to justify it, which is why I stop short of endorsing any alternatives; I’m just saying that the idea that it is a moral and practical necessity for these fortunes to accumulate is a relatively new one.
> BTW, the federal estate tax is 40% and the Washington estate tax is 37%. That's 77%. How much more do you want?
That is higher than I would have expected. It is notable that the federal rate has an exemption that as of 2025 is just under 14 million dollars.
This is a completely unproven theory. I haven't seen any society where unscrupulous actors wouldn't exploit various exploitable aspects for their own advantage.
The so-called "equalitarian" communist society I previously lived under (pre-1990 Eastern Europe) was basically raped though and through by unscrupulous players using political power (in lieu of straight financial power) to their own advantage.
What fortunes enable people to do are great things. Like found rocket companies.
Keep in mind that the wealthy people under free markets created that wealth. It wasn't confiscated from others.