The True Value of A Billion Dollars
How the world's billionaires have more money than they could ever possibly spend
According to Forbes, as of March 18, 2020, there were approximately 2,100 billionaires worldwide…
Many of us have heard of the most predominant billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, and we tend to think things like “Wow… that is a lot of money” when contemplating their wealth, but I don’t think that most of us actually understand how much a billion dollars is.
I recently heard a statistic that helped break down how virtually impossible it would be to ever spend a billion dollars in one lifetime and it absolutely blew my mind, so I decided to dive deeper into the true value of a billion dollars to share with all of you. And let me tell you… it’s probably more than you think.
If you were given a billion dollars and told that you could spend it at a rate of $1,000 a day, it would take you about 2,740 years before you ran out of money. That equates to $5,000 a day for more than 500 years or $100,000 every single day for 25 years.
This means that if you were given a billion dollars and told to spend it in one year, you would have to spend a minimum of $2,739,726 a day to reach zero by the end of the year.
If you had a stack of a billion dollars in one dollar bills, the height of the stack would run 67.9 miles high. That’s high enough to reach into the troposphere — one of the major outer layers of the earth’s atmosphere.
The current most expensive car in the world is a Bugatti La Voiture Noire or RS 132 Crore, which costs $18.68 million dollars. For a billion dollars, you could buy this car more than 50 times.
According to census.gov, the average household income in the United States in 2019 was $68, 703. A billion dollars is 14,555.4 times greater than that number. Meaning that a person with one billion dollars could pay the household incomes of more than 14,555 people for one year.
The approximated cost to spend one week in every single country in the world is totaled out to $675,500. This means that a person with a billion dollars could spend one week in every country in the world 1,480 separate times. Or they could spend 1,480 weeks in every country in the world, which would take 5,550 years to complete.
These are just a few of the statistics regarding how much a billion dollars really equates to. As you can see, all of these numbers would be almost unequivocally impossible to achieve.
This means that those nearly 2,100 individuals mentioned at the beginning of this article (all of which have more than a billion dollars each) are in control of more money than the human race could ever possibly need or imagine.
Just to show how in-control these individuals are, the estimated cost to completely end world hunger for one year is estimated to be anywhere between $7 billion and $265 billion. Now, mind you, this is a very large gap, but even worst-case scenario (the cost to end world hunger totaling out to $265 billion) Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates alone could do it and have a remaining $38.5 billion to split between the two of them.
You guys, this is insane! A billion dollars is SO much money we can’t even begin to comprehend the enormity of it. Let alone can we even vaguely understand the 8 trillion dollars total that the world’s billionaires possess.
I don’t know about you guys, but I know that for me, it’s statistics like this that make me wonder how and why anyone would ever need a billion dollars…
