As the world gets more and more billionaires, and the income disparity gets wider with each passing day, I thought it made sense to comprehend how much a billion actually is. I found these on Twitter, UC Berkeley site, and various other places on the internet. Each one attempts to explain a billion in a relatable way, and blows your mind in the process.
- If you were born in 1492 and made $5,000 every, single day from then until today you would still not have a billion dollars.
- A billion seconds is 32 years.
- If you make $100,000 a year, you would need to work for 10,000 years to earn a billion dollars.
- If you save $100 per day it would take you 27,398 years to save a billion.
- If you start saying the numbers that make up a billion at an average rate of one number every 3 second (which in reality is probably a lot faster than you can say the bigger numbers), it will still take you over 95 years to say all the numbers.
- Asterisks on paper – if you fill up one piece of paper with 4000 asterisks – you will need 250,000 pieces of paper to show 1 billion asterisks.
- A billion step hike – you could circumnavigate the equator 15 times with 1 billion steps.
Hope that helps make sense of the staggering wealth of the word’s richest, and the wide impassable chasm that seems to exist in income equality.
(Images courtesy Humphrey Yang’s Tiktok)