I know to some it's a controversial take, but I've said it once and I'll say it again: billionaires shouldn't exist. At the very least, there shouldn't be so many of them.
I still see a lot of people defending billionaires — oftentimes millionaires or those who hope to one day become wealthy. But I don't think people are actually conceiving of just how much money $1 billion is, let alone multiple billions. Just to put it in perspective, here are a few facts and figures from this Reddit thread, along with some graphics from r/LateStageCapitalism, r/DataIsBeautiful, and r/TheyDidTheMath.
*For the record, the thread is on if billionaires are bad people. If you want my opinion, a billionaire is not inherently a bad person, and rather we should blame the system that allows so many billionaires to exist (though certainly some billionaires are bad people).
1. "To understand the difference between a million and a billion, it’s easier to use time. One million seconds ago = about 12 days ago. One billion seconds ago = about 32 YEARS ago."
2. In order to further visualize how much a billion dollars is, just look at it demonstrated through grains of rice.
3. The average human lifespan is about 26,000 days. (The math: worldwide averages of female and male life expectancies give us an average of 71.4 years, or about 26,000 days). In order to make $1 billion in a lifetime, you'd have to make over $38K every single day from birth to death without a single break. Or, if you were born with $1 billion, you could spend $38K every single day without running out of money.
4. If you made $5K a day from the time Columbus came to America, you would still not be a billionaire.
5. And if you earned $2,000 an hour working 40 hours a week since the year 0 A.D., you'd have around $8.4 billion — and there'd still be 77 Americans richer than you (the 30 in the below tweet is based on a past Forbes list).
6. If you made $100 an hour and worked 10 hour days every single work day of the year, it would still take you almost 4,000 years to become a billionaire.
7. "There is no honest way to make billions through your own labor. A computer programmer's average salary is $96.65K, which is equal to around $46 per hour if you only work 40 hours a week. Now let's say your coding is worth 10 times more than the average programmer's, so $460 per hour. And you're superhuman: you can code all day every day. No need to sleep, eat, or shit. You would be making about $4 million in a year. It would still take you 250 years to get to $1 billion."
8. "The average American household makes around $60K a year, it would take that average household over 16,000 years to accumulate $1B. Think about that: SIXTEEN THOUSAND YEARS."
9. And if you made $11K every day since America signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, you still wouldn't be a billionaire (you'd have $991.7 million) And, in fact, Jeff Bezos makes that much in less than a month (under 28 days).
10. Here's another way to look at Bezos' ridiculous, inconceivable wealth using stairs as an example. You can also check out this fun site that shows his wealth.
11. The 2,640 billionaires of the world control $12.2 trillion dollars. This means we could seize $6.5 trillion from the billionaire class without even reducing the number of billionaires.
12. The amount of billionaires in the world has grown a TON in just the last few decades. In 1982, when they first created the Forbes 400, there were only 15 billionaires in America. In 1987, when Forbes first created their worldwide billionaires list, there were 140 billionaires in the world. Of course, adjusting for inflation the number of people who were "billionaires" back then (despite not having net worths over $1 billion at that time) would've been higher, but certainly not in the thousands.
13. Also in the past few decades, $50 trillion has been transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% in America. If our income distribution had remained similar to what it was in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s (rather than getting way worse), the bottom 90% would've retained trillions, which could have doubled median income in the US, according to Time Magazine.
15. And according to Pew Research, "The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016."
16. Between 1978 and 2019, CEO salaries grew by 940%. How much did worker salaries grow in that time? 12%.
17. Here's a fun graphic of what the wealth distribution was like in the US a decade ago, versus what people think it is and what they'd like it to be. (You can watch the full video on it here). Spoiler alert: it's only gotten worse since then.
18. Let's talk about the billionaires and the pandemic. Billionaires gained as a whole $1.2 trillion during the pandemic (later estimates are closer to $5 trillion, and the 1% reportedly grew their total wealth by over $12 trillion). The number of billionaires also increased — in fact, a new billionaire was made practically every day of the pandemic.
20. Let's look at it by generation. Baby boomers hold about half of the US wealth. Millennials, as of 2020, owned 4.6% of the nation's wealth. That may make sense, as they've been around much longer to amass wealth...except in comparison, back when baby boomers were the age millennials are today (in 1989), they owned 21% of US wealth.
21. Now let's look at it by country. The US has the largest wealth gap compared to most first-world countries by a long shot.
22. Now let's talk about the weird loyalty some "rich" people seem to have to the uber-rich. If your net worth is under $500 million, remember that you're closer to having a negative net worth than you are to being a billionaire. Also, you'd need to be making $650,000 a year (much more in some states) to be in the one percent — so if your yearly income is less than half of that, you're closer to making no money than being a one-percenter. Basically, if you make $320,000 a year (a wildly high income), you're still closer to being dirt poor or in debt than to being a one-percenter. This is why I don't get why even "rich" people side with the ultra-rich — you have much more in common with the middle class and even the poor.
23. In fact, if we're looking at the tippity top...Bill Gates, currently the sixth richest man in the world, is still closer to having a net worth of zero (he has a net worth of $104 billion) than he is to matching the wealth of the richest man in the world, Bernard Arnault (network of $211 billion).
24. Let's just finish with a quick note that billionaires are also killing the planet.
25. Just check out their yacht travel in 2017.
Let's end on some final thoughts: while all the above facts and graphics are helpful in illustrating the problem, I'm aware that many billionaires are billionaires not through easily liquidized assets but stocks and company valuations* (that, yes, provide employment to people. Although I could write a whole other article on these peoples' companies and how they underpay or exploit their workers). The issue is a lot more complicated than simply redistributing wealth or even taxing the wealthy. I'm not here to provide a solution — I'm not a politician! But these issues of wealth inequality and the rising number of billionaires are getting to an absolutely wild level that needs to be addressed, and the first step towards that is awareness...especially for more well-off/upper-middle-class people who have been refusing to join the fight because they think they're being targeted, when really, many of them are also victims of this vastly skewed system.
What do you think about the above facts, figures, and graphics? What do you think about billionaires or one-percenters in general? What do you think the solutions to these issues are? Let us know in the comments!
Some submissions have been edited for length/clarity, to adjust math, or to use current numbers.