What’s a Billion Dollars Look Like?

With the surge in the number of billionaires around the world¹ and, now, Tesla dangling a $1 trillion pay package under the nose of Elon Musk to keep him on board, big numbers are now a part of daily conversation. But what is a billion?

Well, one and two-digit numbers are relatively tractable – our fingers and multiples of our fingers get us to a hundred and even a thousand. Then, we have the leap to big numbers. A million (1 followed by six zeros – 1,000,000) is a thousand thousands. A billion, 1,000,000,000 (that’s nine zeros) is a thousand million. A trillion is a thousand billion.

Or, to put things in a physical perspective, take a $100 bill that is 0.0043 inches thick and pile them up.

• The real median household income in the US is $80,610². In $100 bills, that is a stack 3.47 inches high.
• A million dollars (10,000 $100 bills) is 43 inches high (3.6 ft.).
• A billion dollars (10 million $100 bills) is a stack 3,583 feet high (2/3 of a mile).
• A trillion dollars (10 billion $100 bills) is a pile 679 miles high.

Let’s give some physical equivalents for these numbers.

• The real median household income ($80,610) is just short of the height of a standard poker playing card (3.5 inches).

  

• A million dollars (43 inches – 3.6 ft) is the height of an average 4-year-old child.

  

• A billion dollars (3,583 feet high (2/3 of a mile)) is much taller than Burj Khalifa (Dubai, current tallest building in the world) at 2,717 ft. – just over a half-mile high.

  

• A trillion-dollar pile of $100 bills is 679 miles high. That is the distance from Hudson, NY, to Chicago, IL. Or, the distance between West Palm Beach, FL, and New Orleans, LA

  

  

  Should we allow billionaires (or shortly, trillionaires) to exist?

Make no mistake about it. Billionaires are not some natural function of the economy. They represent the fifty-year-long campaign by the rich and corporations to rewrite the laws and regulations of capitalism to feed their avarice to the exclusion of the bottom 90%+ of the world’s population. Billionaires did not become billionaires because they are smarter and work harder than everyone else. No, they rigged the system.

I’ve written about this question earlier: Billionaires are a symptom of a political pathology. And, here is another take on this problem from YouTube: Why billionaires should be ILLEGAL.