Peter, crying: It’s the Curiosity Rover’s birthday and he has to sing happy birthday all by himself on Mars and thats sad
Tony, already building a rocket: Say no more
Peter and Tony: *arrive and hop out of there rocket, only to see shuri in a super high tech space suit, holding cupcakes, and standing next to T'challa in his black panther suit because of course shuri made it so it could withstand a vaccum*
T'challa: she made me come here. It’s not too late for you if you run.
Tony, who loves all robots so fucking much: Ummmm why would we leave
Peter, holding up a gift: yeah, we brought presents!!!!
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.
i went to the gym today and there was a guy going to TOWN on the punching bags so i asked him “rough night?” and he said “my wife’s on a business trip and i miss her” and if that isnt the most steve rogers thing in the world idk what is
so my roomates girlfriend just caught me in the kitchen and its so hard to play it cool when you never see this person you only hear her yowling like a cat in heat while her asshole gets played with so me, trying to act as casual as i possibly could, forgot i was holding an onion and not a delightful apple and bit into it fully expecting a honeycrisp but instead got the equiv of biting solid piss
lol wtaf. i can’t read a single word of this paragraph
Ok but imagine being the gf here
You’ve been chillin with ur S/O and u decide to get up and get a snack. U never talk to ur S/O’s roommate, but u wanna play it cool like u didn’t just have sex 20 minutes ago in this apartment while said roommate was probably home. Awk af, but u got this.
U look up and nod at them, about to offer a noncommittal “hey” or “how’s it going,” when the fucking roommate just
Okay so I love things with Peter and Shuri confusing the others with memes but consider this…
Steve Rodgers has been studying pop culture to try to “get with the times”. He probably doesn’t know how much the average adult knows, so this man has seen ALL of the memes, just because he thought that they were common knowledge.
Peter and Shuri: THIS BITCH EMPTY
Steve, without looking up from his phone: yeet
Peter and Shuri: I’d do anything fow you Captain Amewica-
Steve, without even a hint of malice in his voice: Then perish.
C A N O N
peter and shuri: mr. white wolf i would die for you
steve: Big Mood
Big mood
Shuri, to Peter: How did you take down Captain America?
Steve: He shot me in the legs, cause my shield’s the size of a dinner plate, and I’m an idiot.
what she says: “Oh I don’t mind; we can eat anywhere. I’m not picky.”
what she means: “For my entire life, I’ve been called bossy/picky/selfish/arrogant/bitchy for voicing my own opinions and making my views known, so now when someone I care about asks me about what I want, my immediate gut reaction is to defer to the other person’s preference. it’s less of a hassle to capitulate to someone else’s desires than to risk having someone verbally berate me for being truthful about what I want.”
Why does being in your early 20s feel so much like only having 5 years of your life left in which you need to achieve as much as possible? why do I feel like I have an approaching deadline for success?
Because society has conditioned you to think and feel that way. When there actually is no deadline for anything. Just to live life
