> If you earn $25 per hour, Musk makes that equivalent in passive investment returns every 58.400 seconds (assuming a conservative 5% annual return on his wealth).
(450,000,000,000 * .05) / 365 / 86400 (seconds/day) = $713.47/second.
You'd have to work 28.539 hours at $25/hour to make what he makes passively in one second.
Put another way, your annual income working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year without time off, (40 * 52 * 25 = $52,000) would take him 72.89 seconds or 1.21 minutes to achieve passively at the conservative 5% annual return rate.
The visualization is good, but the content is ... fraught.
I'm all for wealth redistribution and ending inequality, but analyzing wealth 1:1 with cash isn't a serious way to think about the issue. We should all realize that liquidizing Amazon shares and turning them into cash that floods the market wouldn't do anything other than gut pensions and create inflation.
It's better to think of ways of getting wealth (not cash) out from under billionaires. And it's something we should do because we believe this kind of wealth is bad for society, not because we think it will magically give us free stuff.
That was hilarious!
It is however, out of date. At the time of creation, the 400 richest people in the world owned $3.2T of wealth, now you only need to take the top 23 richest people to amass $3.2T of wealth.
How many mouths Amazon feeds is not on-topic. Imagine that he got his wealth by magic. Poof. He has it. The data would still be the same.
His wealth, as of 2021, is literally unimaginable the same way that counting the number of stars in the universe is.
Wow. It's just... so... overwhelmingly wealthy. Amazingly, spectacularly, unfathomably wealthy.
Reminds me of the story of Mansa Musa, and how he took a trip once and it affected the economies of the areas he visited for generations. . . The influence of these guys strains the imagination.
[edit: @spencerflem posted it while I was ruminating - https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3... check it out!]
Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...
That is $51 billion by my calculation.
Musk is worth $400 billion.
Why do I care how many jets an ultra wealthy person can buy? I literally am not affected by it at all. In fact, my best friend is an aircraft mechanic at a popular private airport. He directly benefits (full wage, salary and benefits) from the rise in private air travel.
In the USA, the wealth of the top 25 people is equal to that of the entire bottom 50%.
My only critique would be to put into perspective social problems (e.g., homelessness, medical debt, etc) to demonstrate what portion of these could be solved through the wealth of a single billionaire. This is going to be even more critical as we approach the bleak reality of having our first trillionaire, barring global catastrophe wiping out asset values.
> Back in July of 2021, U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told us it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
The problem is that it would mean directing his wealth and influence according to the guidance of others, which would detract from the cult of personality billionaires carefully cultivate for themselves. It’s a difference of emphasis: sure, their fortune and influence could end world hunger/buy everyone a home/pay off medical debts, but they can’t solve these problems themselves because they’re not capable of doing so.
And so they don’t. They let problems fester because they cannot get the credit they want for fixing it. They’re unconcerned with actually solving problems, and solely concerned with recognition.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1gm8z...
At some point, these big numbers are generalized as “big numbers” and we don’t conceptually comprehend the significant difference between “big numbers”.
100,000 seconds equals 1 day.
1 million seconds equals 11 days.
1 billion seconds equals 31 years.
They can access credit by giving poetuons of their wealth as collateral. Do you think they sustain lavish lifestyles and have an outsized influence by crashing the stock value of their companies?
A billionaire's net worth is measured in dollars. If that isn't a valid unit of measuringing their wealth, then find another way to measure it. The theoretical loss in stock price if they sell their holdings shouldn't factor in here, because it isn't universally true, and doesn't actually change the real-world value of their assets.
I too cannot liquidate my entire net worth without selling my house and car, cashing out my retirement accounts, and spending lots of fees in the process. Regardless, my net worth is still measured in the dollars those things are worth before I liquidate them, because that's how wealth is measured.
Musk spent $44B buying a website that has since plummeted in value, and his net worth has only skyrocketed since. It seems like wealth for billionaires does indeed work differently than wealth for the rest of us, and it is fact MORE forgiving for billionaires than it is for us.
2. Transaction costs for liquidating your wealth is materially different from selling enough to significantly affect the market for an asset. As an extreme example, large holders of a meme cryptocurrency cannot sell the majority of their holdings without crashing the value of their coin.
3. Borrowing works for smaller amounts if you can spread out the sales of your assets over a long period of time (or if you don't need to sell at all, e.g. if investing in something that gives you returns).
The comparisons are still good if we look at a "normal billionaire" (Let's say Charles Koch) with "only" $65 billion dollars (but they are much more diversified and fungible). The example of him buying a 787 and wrecking it would be the equivalent of me burning $10k. But some of the elements on this page don't work right when you use that few of billions to compare against.
"You could be one day the hypothetical person mentioned in the article with USD100000 net worth".
The way articles like this and most popular media portrays it, people like Jeff Bezos are wealthy because they are hoarding money that they somehow extracted from the productive economy and diverted to their use by nefarious means. Like fairy tale dragons perched on their pile of gold and treasure at the top of a mountain, lording it over the poor peasants in the village down below.
When in reality, someone like Bezos or Musk is "worth" their billions of dollars only in some theoretical sense, based on the notional book value of their ownership of the immensely productive and valuable compan(ies) they built. This is entirely abstract - they could likely not sell their share for cash. But more importantly, it generally represents wealth that truly has been "created" - in 2000 there was no SpaceX and no Tesla, and now there is, and they're 'worth' $800 billion dollars, and Musk "owns" a large fraction of that. But this is entirely wealth that was created from zero through the creation and organization and leadership of these companies. It wasn't taken from anyone, taken from workers or consumers, or diverted from the economy. It was created out of thin air!
