What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

[loloquwowndueo]

What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example.

Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

[climb_stealth]

Mindboggling, thank you. Right on that note is one of my favourite tweets on the internet:

> Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?

[WalterBright]

A friend of mine, after a ski accident, looked for a knee rehab place. The one he found was patronized by pro athletes. He said they worked out like mad. He asked them why, and they said that if they didn't get back in shape, the $$$$ gravy train for them was over.

[lurk2]

I was sure your numbers were wrong but if we assume $200,000 in your sleep means $600,000 a day, that’s $219,000,000 per year.

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.

[herval]

Intuitively it makes sense that someone that owns a bunch of assets will have tons more money than a performer?

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?!”

[ninju]

There's a comparison between Michael Jordan, at his prime, and Bill Gates

https://www.spiegl.org/humor/jordan_gates.html

[kwanbix]

What is crazy is that they probably pay less taxes (percentage wise) than you and me. If they pay any taxes.

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...

[WalterBright]

> Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

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).

[dmoy]

$1 billion dollars looks like $20-$35 million dollars a year of indefinite spending, inflation adjusting, depending on the exact form of the billion dollars and the tax rates involved.

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.

[harmmonica]

I always thought one of the biggest problems with modern education is not spending enough time teaching people about interest rates/return on investment. If everyone just understood what you're pointing out here--just really "got it"--I feel like the world would be in a much better place. It's not dire (I don't think?), and I know we've come a very long way, but, man, it could be so much better.

[throw0101d]

Tom Scott did a video on this, "A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip":

* 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.

[xhrpost]

1 million seconds -> 11.5 days

1 billion seconds -> 31.5 years

[JadeNB]

As somebody, maybe Sagan, said, pi seconds is approximately a nanocentury.

[JoeAltmaier]

A cube of 100 dollar bills four feet on a side is about 160M dollars. So, six of them.

[rapnie]

This made me do a search on the missing Iraqi billions, as I remember there were details at the time how it was packaged in pallets and flown into the country. Couldn't find that, but according to The Guardian [0]:

> 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

[derektank]

Surprisingly portable. I can see why the Treasury doesn't want to print larger denomination bills

[bji9jhff]

Actually, a billion dollars look like a ten digit number at the bottom of a spreadsheet.

[xnx]

This would fit in a standard cargo van, but the weight would crush it.

[jules]

This visualization is wildly inaccurate. The supposed 1000 pixels are actually 100x100 pixels, which is 10,000 not 1000. Secondly, on many screens they are not actually pixels. For example, on a macbook pro you're likely seeing 40,000 pixels in actuality.

[xtiansimon]

I like this work exploring magnitude. The Eames film does this explicitly, “Powers of Ten” (1977)

A happy find is an exhibition catalogue on the theme of the numinous pre- and post-photography:

Clair, Jean. Cosmos from Goya to De Chirico, from Friedrich to Kiefer: art in pursuit of the infinite (2000)

https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19133047W/Cosmos?edition=key...

[bnycum]

"The average American household spent $87,432 in 2021." That number seems awfully high to me? That's more than I am seeing the average household makes in 2023.

[brianwawok]

Can’t let silly things like income limit your spending!

For a real answer, I’d assume retired people earn 0 but still spend? So that could change the math

[haizhung]

You just discovered the difference between average and median :-)

For the average, Jeff bezos is pulling it up.

[seangrogg]

Klarna sends its regards.

[8bitsrule]

This visualization worked for me: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-art...

$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.

[shmerl]

> To earn $1,000,000,000 you'd have to work more than 1,379 lifetimes!

Reminds "Something for Nothing" by Sheckley.

[BinaryMachine]

thats depressing

[throwmeaway222]

It looks like 4 (I think we're up to $250M TC now?) AI engineers at Meta.

[latchkey]

Reminds me of this gem: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

[jongjong]

When you understand the extreme inequality; that most people don't have $100K and some people have billions, and you understand how the monetary system works to compound the billions, it puts into perspective how the system functions.

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.

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.

[yvessy]

Am I the only one who was expecting to see a picture of literally $1B in cash?

[koakuma-chan]

No

[jdross]

The second box is 10,000 pixels (100x100). Not 1,000 pixels (31x31)

[sublinear]

> consider the individual buying power of a billionaire

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.

[apothegm]

How much does a sports franchise cost? A newly constructed high-rise? A private island? A contract for a ~~private army~~ security force? A bribe?

[SoftTalker]

Now consider we accrue about $3 billion per day in interest on our national debt.

(I originally posted $300 billion which is a number I heard recently but then realized that couldn't be right).

[LimeLimestone]

When I try to zoom in (by pinching the touchpad) on one of the charts at the bottom of the site, Firefox crashes. I guess there are too many pixels in the black bar :)

MacBook M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, Firefox 141.0

[1970-01-01]

This is a good reference for the next time yet another security company goes for $XX,000,000,000 and the buyer says "because that's how much they're worth"

It's all bullshit valuation after $500,000,000.

[nsxwolf]

Now stack them into cubes and it looks way smaller.

[syockit]

It's really unintuitive how a mere increase in number of dimensions could totally change the scale of things. This is the crux of the curse of dimensionality in machine learning. If you simply stacked it high, it may almost reach the sun (but no quite), but once you lay it into roughly a square (20000 x 50000), it spans only over a mile per side. To lay it roughly into a cube of 100 dollar stacks, you'd have something like 65 x 150 x 1026, which turns out to be about only 12 yards per side.

EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.

[Animats]

The world has about 3000 US$ billionaires.

[m3kw9]

I don’t think anyone has a billion dollars cash in their bank accounts. Is mostly valuation and likely what billionaires keep in cash is 5 million

[taf2]

Now add the US debt!

[stephen_g]

If you're looking at a billion dollars you're looking at all kinds of debt, including US bonds. Much of what gives money value is the existence of debt (another thing is the obligation of taxation). Always has been, which is why trying to tie currencies to values of commodities or precious metals has always collapsed eventually...

[neilv]

Presenter: "With a million dollars, you can own a nice home."

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."

[mikewarot]

In my neighborhood a million dollars would have a nice home, and 3 rental properties, for a total of 4 homes.

[jiggawatts]

In Australia, a million dollars (US or AUD, doesn't matter) is a deposit on a nice home.

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.

[Detrytus]

I find this visualization pretty useless. What I would appreciate is putting billion of dollars in terms of actual property you could buy with it, something like:

- 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.

[collinmcnulty]

There’s a xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/980/

It’s a little old so inflation is a factor, but still really good intuition

[apsurd]

as useless as you say the visualization is, so is property comparison because what does "$1B worth of real estate" even mean?

Raw materials + labor + debt financing + geographical point-in-time land value? It'd be easier to intuit these vs look at some nice pixels?

[tharkun__]

Did you actually scroll to the bottom or got bored while scrolling and scrolling and scrolling on the big black box running "top to bottom"?

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 very area specific. I can buy the same house / palace for way less than a billion in one place vs. another.

     This is an oceanic yacht of the same value

From a quick Google, most super yachts "in that price range" cost less than 0.5 billion. Not that this makes it any more relatable.

    This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build

Seems like the house thing above :shrug:

    This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B

Refineries always just look huge to me. Whether they cost $1B or $100,000,000 I really couldn't tell you. It's just a huge place of tubes and stuff. I have no frame of reference so to speak.

    This is how many US senators you can bribe, and how many favorable bills you can push through Congress /s

Lacking frame of reference as well, though yeah, the /s was worth thinking about this one. Maybe the original site could represent this as a number or relatively sized circles. "This is how many bills you could buy with this in 1975 vs. 2000 vs. 2025" /s

But then it'd really be about inflation instead of perspective.