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.
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?
MacBook M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, Firefox 141.0
- 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.
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.
1 billion seconds -> 31.5 years
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.
Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.
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?!”
> Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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;
}
}
}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).
Reminds "Something for Nothing" by Sheckley.
It's all bullshit valuation after $500,000,000.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg
The length of one million USD is about the distance of a US football field or UK football pitch (which he demonstrates walking in a parking lot).
The length of one billion USD is driving over an hour at a speed of 100 kph (55 mph), the rest of the video.
EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.
(I originally posted $300 billion which is a number I heard recently but then realized that couldn't be right).
For a real answer, I’d assume retired people earn 0 but still spend? So that could change the math
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.
$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.
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.
You could probably have a Chrome extension which lets you click on someone's account name on any online platform and it will automatically deploy a team of 10 full-time people to mess up that person's life for the next 10 years.
And sadly, this is the kind of 'innovation' which might thrive in our increasingly unequal society because 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.
JoeAltmaier•3h ago
bji9jhff•3h ago
derektank•3h ago
rapnie•2h ago
> Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq
xnx•2h ago