Billion ... With A B

Humans are notoriously bad at large numbers. It's hard to wrap our minds around something of that scale. We're wired to think locally and linearly, not exponentially (it's one of the reasons I love AI so much).

Here are a couple of ways to help you understand a billion dollars. 

via AskOpinion

Next, let's look at spending over time. If you were to spend a dollar every second for an entire day, you would spend $86,400 per day. You can do that for approximately twelve days if you have a million dollars. With a billion dollars, you can do that for over 31 years. Ignoring the difference between net worth and cash, Jeff Bezos could spend $9M per day for over 31 years.

If you make $100K a year, you can earn $1 million in 10 years. At the same rate, it would take you 10,000 years to make $1 billion.

Here is an example framed around spending money.  Imagine that someone making $50K a year decides to buy a laptop, a car, and a house. Now we're going to make a relative comparison of the cost of those items for people making a lot more than $50K per year.  To do this, we'll shrink the cost of the price of those items (to see the relative cost-to-income ratio). For a millionaire, a laptop might cost the equivalent of $100 dollars, a Porsche would cost $3,000 dollars, and a house would cost $25,000. Now, let's say you're Mike Bloomberg, and you're worth $60B. A laptop's relative cost would be pennies, a Porsche's relative cost would be less than 60 cents, and a mansion's relative cost would be around $500 dollars. You could have everything you ever wanted for a minute fraction of your wealth. 

For a different perspective, here's an interesting visualization from informationisbeautiful. It shows various examples of things worth billions of dollars – including the personal wealth of several billionaires. 

via informationisbeautiful

Okay, last one before I show a video ... 

Let's try explaining the concept of a Billion through time. Fifty thousand seconds is just under 14 hours. A million seconds was 11 days ago. A billion seconds ago from today? 1990. Pretty crazy. 

Here's a video from the 1970s that helps you understand scale through the power of tens – and an exploration of our universe.

 

Hope you enjoyed this.  Let me know what you think.