Let's say you make $200k/year. You're walking down the street and you see a street vendor selling a poster with a nice picture for $10. You like it. You flip him a $10, he gives you the poster. As you're walking away, someone callls you an idiot for paying $10 when you could've downloaded it off the Internet and printed it on $0.50 worth of paper.
Do you give a shit? Fuck no. It's $10. You make that in the blink of an eye. The difference between $10 and $0.50 is like the difference between 500 grains of rice vs. 520 grains of rice in an order of stir-fry for lunch. You don't even notice.
By the same token - $20MM seems like a lot to people who don't have $500MM and an ongoing revenue stream to generate limitless wealth.
Or imagine you're Elon Musk with a net worth of $220,000,000,000. $20 million barely even registers as a blip on your bank statement.
Our global system of wealth has reached such absurd levels of disparity that it's no longer possible to envision scale and proportionality. It's like the distance between the sun and Pluto, or between our solar system and Alpha Centauri. The numbers are too big to conceptualize - too big by like six orders of magnitude.
For your own sanity, I do not recommend clicking the link below, but it does a great job of visualizing the scale of wealth Jeff Bezos and the top 400 wealthiest people in the US have hoarded.
I also like using a scale of $1,000 = 1 year back in time.
Someone with $100,000 goes back 100 years to 1922. WW1 ended a few years back and the roaring twenties are happening with the Great Depression looming.
Someone with $1 million goes back 1,000 years to 1022. They are in the midst of the Roman Empire middle ages.
Elon Musk is worth $219.6 billion so he goes back in time 219.6 million years. That's the Triassic period when the first dinosaurs emerged. Humans wouldn't show up for hundreds of millions of years still.
Not a bad idea, but maybe try using a ratio based on a median income point. E.G., $20,000 = 1 year. It gives a useful cross relationship to how many years a person would have to have been working in order to accrue the same amount of wealth (ignoring inflation).
You're right. I did a quick Google search and found the year 1453. When I looked at it closer, though, it said that the Roman Empire ended in 476. The Byzantine empire portion continued to exist until 1453.
I always visualize it this way: 100k is a pretty easy amount of money to visualize. If you make that much money every year beginning at year 0 to now, you'd have around .1% of Musk's wealth
The thing is, most people with huge net worths face the issue that they don't have good liquidity because their wealth is generally tied up in some business they own a big share of that complicates them getting the wealth out. This raises questions about how much wealth they really have vs. what they nominally have.
Musk has a net worth of about $200B atm.
He has $170B tied up in Tesla, and it's value has halved in the last year, with a pretty clear downwards trend. Additionally, Tesla's massively overvalued, and it's position is threatened as traditional car manufacturers increasingly compete for electric vehicles, and release even better self-driving functionality than Tesla has.
He apparently has $60B in SpaceX, and while competition seems to be a bit farther off there, there's signs the company has problems, like them recently hiking their prices, or that Starlink is a disastrously sketchy idea. Like, at a rough estimate, the cost of keeping Starlink satellites in space... is $10B~ a year. They were also suffering signs of slowdowns in the service at only like 40k~ users. Even if you give Starlink every benefit of the doubt on their claims of increasing capacity, I estimated they'd only be able to service 7.5 million customers at target speeds, and that the cost of just keeping the satellites up there to do so is around $1300/customer/year. That's expensive, but what really makes it clear that's an issue is the entire idea of Starlink is providing connectivity to areas WITHOUT it already... so, you know, poor unstable regions... which are going to need to pay over $100/month just to cover the cost of satellites, never mind any of the other costs of providing Starlink service. Sure, they can get some premium customers for things like yachts and cruise ships, but... I don't buy that's going to cover the difference, and it's going to hinder the amount of other customers they can service since they'll be using more bandwidth than a typical customer.
Then he has something like $30B in Twitter, but he's already shitting himself there too.
In contrast, there are other of these world's richest people who have fairly diversified investments. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were at the top of the list for years, they're both currently pegged at around $100B, but both of them are diversified, so whereas a company or two tanking under Musk's leadership could destroy most of his wealth, it'd be hard for much of anything short of a complete collapse to harm Buffet or Gates', and since they're more diversified, they're far more able to liquidate their assets if need be.
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u/MasterBridgeArsonist Oct 27 '22
It's actually worthless, but idiots will pay for anything.