Like if you take those $600 Covid checks that we sent to everyone in America, but instead let's be even more generous. Let's make it $1000. And not just voters or citizens, everyone gets one. Family of four? You get $4000. Hooray. But then someone goes round the entire country and steals all of them
I think a lot of Americans don’t appreciate how wealthy the country is. They don’t have the opportunity to see a lot of it because it’s being hoarded by the top 0.1%!
For me, the realization came when I read about various estimates about how much it would cost to solve homelessness in, say, CA or NY. It’s about how much money the single wealthiest resident of that state has!
To be fair— the sheer imperial level of wealth is new for modern America. In 2009 the richest man alive was Gates at $40.7b; in 2020 it was Bezos at $115b. Now there are multiple fortunes around $200b and Musk is at $269b.
“A billion dollars is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think you’re putting a lot down on your car, but that's just peanuts to a billionaire.”
our minds simply do not properly comprehend that scale
Watched a guy lay out $1B in an excel spreadsheet with $100k in a cell. He randomly deleted a cell and you literally couldn't see where the blank cell was.
To sort of give you an example of the insane scale here, the top 100 richest people in America last year increased in wealth by $2tn. That's just the /increase/. If 10% of the /increase/ were paid as taxes, you could give every US taxpayer a rebate of $1160.
People say stuff like "To a billionaire, spending $200,000 is the equivalent of $10 to you or me.", but it's not even that. To a billionaire, any amount of money is, for all intents and purposes, zero. Because there is no amount of money they can spend that changes their life.
"The billionaire is putting up the $millions in capital for [venture] so they're the one taking the risk (therefore they should get the profits)" - No! They're putting up capital, but they're not taking any risk at all. The risk is borne by the workers putting their time and energy into the project.
But Musk isn’t a billionaire, he’s a quarter-trillionaire. Ten or fifteen years ago there was no one on Earth who could afford to set $44b on fire to dominate the public square. *Four* years ago it was a stretch. The rapid acceleration at the top hasn’t been wholly appreciated.
A million dollars is a lot of money.
A thousand million dollars boggles the mind.
And a boggled mind, sadly, is of no use to anyone.
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Several thousand million dollars makes us curl up into fetal balls, 'cause hard coming back from that.
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It was crazy how much a billion is, let alone 10s/100s of them.
“A billion dollars is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think you’re putting a lot down on your car, but that's just peanuts to a billionaire.”
our minds simply do not properly comprehend that scale
A thousand million dollars boggles the mind.
And a boggled mind, sadly, is of no use to anyone.
---
Several thousand million dollars makes us curl up into fetal balls, 'cause hard coming back from that.