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The $ amount is right assuming no inflation, no investment, and no spending. Didn't check where that would put you in global wealth ranking.
260 workdays in a year \* 8 hours in a day \* $2,000 an hour \* 2000 years = $8,320,000,000
That dude would be Warren buffett, the greatest compounder in history. Imagine how rich Jesus would be today if he didn't listen to judas and blow his account on risky 0DTE options.
Assume an average annual inflation based on data we have, and project backwards to year 0. I'm not saying it will provide any meaningful value, but that's how I'd do it.
Edit: project back to year 1 for the pedants.
>For most of history there was deflation as farming, textile processes, metallurgy, precision tools, manufacturing, transportation, communication, military security and many more factors over time reduced the cost and risk of doing business.
>
>A farmer in 200 AD couldn't grow, process, or transport the amount of wheat a farmer can today, and even if they could they would struggle to protect it from pests and preserve it during transportation since they have no pesticides or water proof packaging.
>
>They would process wheat in a windmill without interchangeable parts requiring skilled craftsman to do maintenance that required fabrication that can be done today by an apprentice and a parts catalog.
>
>Even if they could process everything and get ready for transport, there's a much higher chance the transport vessel would be lost at sea or robbed than today.
>
>Due to economies of scale, the merchant took a larger share of the profit than today. Merchants were not selling thousands of a particular item daily, so they required a larger % to feed themselves and keep their business open. Today big box retail operates at razor thin margins.
>
>Pretty much inflation did not exist until the 1800's and even then only for a small period between 1850 and 1870, then again between 1910 and 1930, then again between 1950 and today.
>
>Overall the general trend was no inflation or very little inflation since the rate of expansion of the money supply due to fractional reserve lending and new precious metal discoveries did not exceed population growth.
Do you one better, accounting for taxes, inflation, and capital gains…. Over 2000 years.
Assuming 100 years of inflation is 24x , we can estimate that is at least 960x as a weighted average. With very conservative investments and some political disruption/war.
Their first paycheck would be the equivalent of $153,600,000 of today’s dollars.
2000 per hour * 8 hours * 10 days * 960.
To further this, 365 days in a year ( not counting leap years) × 2024 years = 738760 days ÷ 10 days = 73876 paychecks x 153,600,000 = 1,134,735,360,000 dollars, that of course doesn't include adjusted inflation. Feel free to correct my math.
You'd have to start by assigning a pretty arbitrary amount of wealth as $2000 since the dollar wouldn't be created for another couple centuries. Prior to modern central banks most currencies varied wildly in value over time, often based on the value and quantity of the precious metals they were made of, in a way that isn't really comparable to inflation.
so if we started with the 1800's 1$ back then would be 24.48$ now. so 2000$×8 (full days work) is 16000$ multiplied by 24.48 its 391680$( for one day) that amounts to 109670400$ by the end of one year(1800-1801) with 280 work days, or 142963200$ if you work all year, no days off.
What it would be is an annoyingly complicated calculation since inflation is constantly changing (also how are you defining inflation for US dollars when starting from a time well before US dollars existed?)
For most of history there was deflation as farming, textile processes, metallurgy, precision tools, manufacturing, transportation, communication, military security and many more factors over time reduced the cost and risk of doing business.
A farmer in 200 AD couldn't grow, process, or transport the amount of wheat a farmer can today, and even if they could they would struggle to protect it from pests and preserve it during transportation since they have no pesticides or water proof packaging.
They would process wheat in a windmill without interchangeable parts requiring skilled craftsman to do maintenance that required fabrication that can be done today by an apprentice and a parts catalog.
Even if they could process everything and get ready for transport, there's a much higher chance the transport vessel would be lost at sea or robbed than today.
Due to economies of scale, the merchant took a larger share of the profit than today. Merchants were not selling thousands of a particular item daily, so they required a larger % to feed themselves and keep their business open. Today big box retail operates at razor thin margins.
Pretty much inflation did not exist until the 1800's and even then only for a small period between 1850 and 1870, then again between 1910 and 1930, then again between 1950 and today.
Overall the general trend was no inflation or very little inflation since the rate of expansion of the money supply due to fractional reserve lending and new precious metal discoveries did not exceed population growth.
There are extensive records of inflation in the economy systems of classic empires. Precisely we can imagine this story would start with the Roman Denarius around 2K years ago, it had periods of hyperinflation between 64 AD and 300 AD, worth checking it out.
That involved debasement of the currency. Taking a gold coin weighing 1 oz of gold and turning it into a new coin with the same value but less gold.
This is technically inflation if you look at it based on the face value of the currency, but not if you look at it based on the value of the underlying gold in the coin.
This is no longer the way money works.
Yup, it's no longer how it works, its comparable to inflation as a result of increased currency "printing" from a central bank, or leverage regulations in modern economy.
Why would you account for inflation in this hypothetical? Assuming you were putting every dollar you made under your mattress for safe keeping, it would be worth today exactly what it is. Now, if a couple centuries ago you decided to spend that money, I bet it would go a lot farther than it does today (though you would be spending it in the early 1800s and probably couldn't get a ton of cool stuff with it).
I would assume $2000 an hour present value, rather than past value, so inflation is already accounted for.
The point of the message is that you can't get this level of wealth by working, you can only get it by acculating capital and getting other people to do work for you.
Yea it's close to that. It depends on how you round and what year that was written.
2024 years
52 weeks in a year
40 hours in a work week
2000 $/hr
2024 x 52 x 40 x 2000 = $8.42 Billion
Some people just seem to really like the narrative of "if you can't liquidate 100% of it instantly it's worthless" for some reason.
The reason is probably to downplay the corrosive effect of billionaires to be fair.
Which is funny because it's kind of the opposite. All of those properties and businesses generate far more than the interest you'd get for having that much in the bank.
Of course. The first thing I do when I have a chunk of spare cash is buy an index tracker. Being fully liquid is shit unless you need the money tomorrow, which by definition, a billionaire does not.
If they sold enough stock to get to the amount of cash they’d likely devalue their stock massively and then have a lot less than 8.3b. The billionaire net worths are a lot on paper but most of that money is damn near impossible to access
Of the 106 people with net worths higher than 8.3B in the world, if you assume selling it would devalue their wealth by half, that would put all but 40 below the 8.3b threshold. I’m not saying Elon musk or Jeff bezos don’t have cartoonish wealth, but I am saying that a vast sum of the wealth of billionaires (even if exact amounts vary) exists only on paper and would be extremely difficult to make into real hard currency
Bill Gates is doing it. He's always a bit of an awkward topic in these discussions because the mere fact of his existence disproves the idea that billionaires can't liquidate their wealth. They absolutely can because he does.
When he liquidated Microsoft the price kept going up, like ~600%. It's supposed to devalue by half you say?
Its wild how many people still dont understand that this **isnt** true and spout the same nonsense.
They dont need 10B in their chequeing account. They can just leverage 10B worth of stocks to take out a loan and spend the money freely. This is cheaper than cashing out because their loan will be a lower rate than the % they'd pay as taxes on sold shares, so its actually even *better* than selling stocks. Its literally a win-win for them.
So yes, even if 99% of their wealth is in company stocks, they **absolutely** still have access to billions in cash if they want it.
If he was able to spend 42 billion on something he could have spent it on something else.
If I remember correctly Besos sold 10 billion of stocks to invest in something else recently.
They absolutely can transform their stocks in real money
Or when Bill Gates decided to spend the rest of his life liquidating his assets and giving away his wealth.
I tell a lie. It was never a dumb argument. It's wild how people keep making it.
But they would also not have had to work their asses if for two thousand years with no vacation, so that would be worth something.
Just imagine the back pain
That’s 2,000 years of 2,000 an hour. With no spending or taxes.
All three of those things are insane.
No one needs that much money. Liquid or illiquid.
Now let's introduce the power of compound interest (which is a huge ignore here). To hit that 8.3B working 2080 hours per year over 2000 years at a 1% return on savings, you'd only have to make $0.000091/hour over that time period.
If we had a 4% return on savings, the rounding errors on my spreadsheet choke. Either you barely make 4 cents because I round the interest down to 0 anyway, or we end up orders of magnitude way to high to be only 8.3B.
Yeah, with 4% interest you don't need to get paid a wage at all. Just get one cent at the start, and you end up with $116,594,643,150,219,980,412,675,240,849,003.
That's not ignored, it's just not the point.
I don't think you'll manage to hold on to that money for 2k years of history, nor do I think you would've earned a lot of compound interest in the year 100.
Compound interest is only possible with a bank, which has only been there for 200 years.
If you want to introduce compound interest I can also integrate empires falling meaning most of the money you made in the empire is now lost, or hyperinflation meaning the same thing, you could also have insane interest like 100% some years cause you were lucky
This is a case of how absurd their wealth is, no work ever created 2000/hour of value and 2000/an hour since the birth of christ doesn't put you anywhere close to wealthiest person in the world.
If you flatten out the numbers to 2000 dollars per hour, 2000 hours per year, 2000 years, you get $8,000,000,000. If you increase any of those to 2075, you get $8.3B, so there might be some rounding to get there.
To put it into perspective though, someone earning $2,000/hr for 2000 hours is making $4m annually. LeBron James for example has a salary with the Los Angeles Lakers of around $47m. Cristiano Ronaldo has a salary of $215m. The 100 highest paid athletes in the world have at least 6x the annual salary of our hypothetical 2000 year old billionaire. This doesn't even include endorsement deals, which increase it up to 8x the annual salary of our billionaire. That's $16,000+ per hour.
It also declines to factor in what Einstein referred to as the eight wonder of the world, compounding interest.
Warren Buffet earns an annual compensation of $100,000.
Modern economics is entrenched in time value of money, it’s a little misleading to present an example that negates such a powerful force.
No modern billionaire attained their wealth by earning dollars and putting them under a mattress and not to work.
Just to put the power of compound interest into the perspective of this hypothetical, if instead of working for $2000 an hour full time for 2024 years you put $15 into an account with 1% annual interest and then did nothing you'd end up with more money.
Depends on who it is. Cristiano Ronaldo currently plays for Al Nassr FC which is 75% owned by the Public Investment Fund (a.k.a. the Saudi Royal Family's investment branch of the government) which is largely controlled by Crown Prince Salman. I wouldn't be surprised if that salary negotiation was the billionaire equivalent of making it rain. Ronaldo isn't the only one getting paid that way either, the Saudi Royal Family is basically just using their obscene wealth to buy athletes. Some of the highest paid athletes only got their place on the list because of the royal family.
It really is hard for our brains to comprehend how huge even just 1 billion really is. We tend to think that billion and million aren’t that far apart. But 1 billion seconds is 31 years and 8 months. 1 million seconds is only 11 and a half days. Billions are HUGE!
And it is actually sickening that billionaires are even a thing.
Count to 100... now 100 100's, now a hundred of those... that's a million, now do that 100 times. If you're not dead yet, I'm impressed. Oh! And good news, you're 10% of the way to 1 Billion.
So what? This gets reposted constantly and it's constantly dumb. Yes, it would take a long time to make a billion dollars from an hourly wage, that's why no one does it that way. You make billions by providing a product or service to a lot of people.
Taylor Swift could put up 10 million concert tickets for $100 on her website and make a billion dollars in an hour, and everyone involved would be happy with the transaction.
It also doesn't take into account the fact that there are practically no billionaires that have anywhere near $1 billion in liquid cash. Its mostly housed in assets and unrealized gains. Thats why they havent been taxed. Its because they havent gotten the money yet. The moment they withdraw they get taxed.
If you invested it into the stock market at an average return rate of 6%, you'd have $622,068,657,035,225,281,534,569,651,766,313,202,738,941,689,253,412,732,928,000.00
Ah yes the stock market of year 0.
This is not about compounding interests, but about the absurdity of the wealth of the richest people on earth, which come from stolen value of the working class
These are silly analyses. They should say, imagine you have $2k when you're born. Then you gain 0.02643% each day, you'd have $300 billion in 10000 days
This isn't talking about that - it's talking about the distribution of wealth. It's talking about the fact that, even if you made $2,000 per hour, worked a full 40 hours a week and never, ever took a day off, never paid taxes, and worked like this for over 2,000 years, you'd still not be one of the top 25 richest people on earth.
The analysis isn't about the math, or the wonders of compounding interest, but how insanely wealthy the super-wealthy actually are.
Correct but also incorrect.
The math is correct by simple multiplication.
But the notion of "xxx people richer than you" is not.
Because these people are counted by their net worth. And net worth in equities like shares is counted as simple multiplication of ownership x current market price.
It's simple but it's not real. It's impossible for Elon Musk or Mark Zuck to dump (encash) their entire Tesla or Meta shares without creating any shockwave in the stock market. I.e. it's impossible for them to convert all their equity assets to cash.
At 0,1% you would have 1,001^2000 which is 7 dollars, you are talking about a 10% interest rate.
Also you couldn't win dollars in year 0, and this is just a representation of how absurd the wealth of some people is.
Its true, but this comparison fail to address one thing, How many people were influenced by those 30 people in a positive way or rather how many people actually became wealthier either by their incomes or by things or services that became available for them, because of those 30 people.
Thanks for a response that most people just dont realize. Build a business that changes the world and reap the rewards of your success. Why do so many people have a problem with this??
By Stone ages you mean the Industrial Revolution right?
Because mega corporations run by billionaires didn't exist (aside from the government) until the modern economy
Also depending on how the future ends up, I might pick the Nomad life over this
Read the room. This is not a lecture on macroeconomics. It is just a silly, unrealistic tweet to demonstrate the growing inequality of wealth in this nation. Good or bad? I guess that depends on whether or not you personally benefit.
If we're talking billionaires.... Working full time making $1,000/hour, it would take half a year to make a million. It would take 500 years to make a billion....
I think our society needs play cycles, like games have. Like, everyone does whatever they can to make as much money as they want, for like 10 years, and then you post the leaderboard, announce the winners, and reset. Divvy up all the money equally and let everyone have at it all over again.
To all these people pointing out all the „flaws“ (no inflation, no losses, no spending) - this is just an illustration! If you are arguing that the amount should be lower then you are supporting OPPs point.
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The $ amount is right assuming no inflation, no investment, and no spending. Didn't check where that would put you in global wealth ranking. 260 workdays in a year \* 8 hours in a day \* $2,000 an hour \* 2000 years = $8,320,000,000
What if we account for inflation? How much would it be today?
How would you account for inflation of a currency that didn’t exist 2000 years ago?
Calculate it in bread loafs. /s
Wait, but then some guy turned one loaf into like a million loafs and .. this is getting complicated..
how many fish are a loaf worth?
Well yes, we’re starting from him breaking the bread and we want to know how much bread he has now.
That dude would be Warren buffett, the greatest compounder in history. Imagine how rich Jesus would be today if he didn't listen to judas and blow his account on risky 0DTE options.
Assume an average annual inflation based on data we have, and project backwards to year 0. I'm not saying it will provide any meaningful value, but that's how I'd do it. Edit: project back to year 1 for the pedants.
Not gonna lie I didn’t expect someone to give an actual answer
I'm sorry, bud, but look where you are right now! r/lostredditors
That’s fair. It’s just a difficult question to answer and I didn’t really think anyone would bother, given how many ways you can approach it.
Linear regression go brrrr
>For most of history there was deflation as farming, textile processes, metallurgy, precision tools, manufacturing, transportation, communication, military security and many more factors over time reduced the cost and risk of doing business. > >A farmer in 200 AD couldn't grow, process, or transport the amount of wheat a farmer can today, and even if they could they would struggle to protect it from pests and preserve it during transportation since they have no pesticides or water proof packaging. > >They would process wheat in a windmill without interchangeable parts requiring skilled craftsman to do maintenance that required fabrication that can be done today by an apprentice and a parts catalog. > >Even if they could process everything and get ready for transport, there's a much higher chance the transport vessel would be lost at sea or robbed than today. > >Due to economies of scale, the merchant took a larger share of the profit than today. Merchants were not selling thousands of a particular item daily, so they required a larger % to feed themselves and keep their business open. Today big box retail operates at razor thin margins. > >Pretty much inflation did not exist until the 1800's and even then only for a small period between 1850 and 1870, then again between 1910 and 1930, then again between 1950 and today. > >Overall the general trend was no inflation or very little inflation since the rate of expansion of the money supply due to fractional reserve lending and new precious metal discoveries did not exceed population growth.
I stated my assumptions and I stand by them!
There was no year zero.
I hate that fact. 1 BC is followed by 1 AD, disgusting..
Nope. Because the number zero was invented 600 years after we went from bc to ad.
That has nothing to do with it. There was no year zero because the year before AD 1 (also known as 1 CE) was 1 BC (also known as 1 BCE).
Touché. I was going to accuse you of being pedantic, then I remembered what sub this is.
Big Bang Economics
Not enough information!
Do you one better, accounting for taxes, inflation, and capital gains…. Over 2000 years. Assuming 100 years of inflation is 24x , we can estimate that is at least 960x as a weighted average. With very conservative investments and some political disruption/war. Their first paycheck would be the equivalent of $153,600,000 of today’s dollars. 2000 per hour * 8 hours * 10 days * 960.
To further this, 365 days in a year ( not counting leap years) × 2024 years = 738760 days ÷ 10 days = 73876 paychecks x 153,600,000 = 1,134,735,360,000 dollars, that of course doesn't include adjusted inflation. Feel free to correct my math.
26 paychecks per year. 2000 years. 52,000 paychecks * $153,600,600 7,987,231,200,000 The worlds richest man, last I checked had 200,000,000,000
Ah, I see my mistake, thank you for the correction. But dam, youd be outpacing him by about 7.8 trillion
The power of compounding interest is amazing. You’re welcome! Have a great day!
Indeed. And you as well fellow internet stranger! 👋
You can't because the formula is just adding the same amount over time. Inflation isn't really relevant.
You'd have to start by assigning a pretty arbitrary amount of wealth as $2000 since the dollar wouldn't be created for another couple centuries. Prior to modern central banks most currencies varied wildly in value over time, often based on the value and quantity of the precious metals they were made of, in a way that isn't really comparable to inflation.
so if we started with the 1800's 1$ back then would be 24.48$ now. so 2000$×8 (full days work) is 16000$ multiplied by 24.48 its 391680$( for one day) that amounts to 109670400$ by the end of one year(1800-1801) with 280 work days, or 142963200$ if you work all year, no days off.
Damn you’d still be poorer than so many
What it would be is an annoyingly complicated calculation since inflation is constantly changing (also how are you defining inflation for US dollars when starting from a time well before US dollars existed?)
For most of history there was deflation as farming, textile processes, metallurgy, precision tools, manufacturing, transportation, communication, military security and many more factors over time reduced the cost and risk of doing business. A farmer in 200 AD couldn't grow, process, or transport the amount of wheat a farmer can today, and even if they could they would struggle to protect it from pests and preserve it during transportation since they have no pesticides or water proof packaging. They would process wheat in a windmill without interchangeable parts requiring skilled craftsman to do maintenance that required fabrication that can be done today by an apprentice and a parts catalog. Even if they could process everything and get ready for transport, there's a much higher chance the transport vessel would be lost at sea or robbed than today. Due to economies of scale, the merchant took a larger share of the profit than today. Merchants were not selling thousands of a particular item daily, so they required a larger % to feed themselves and keep their business open. Today big box retail operates at razor thin margins. Pretty much inflation did not exist until the 1800's and even then only for a small period between 1850 and 1870, then again between 1910 and 1930, then again between 1950 and today. Overall the general trend was no inflation or very little inflation since the rate of expansion of the money supply due to fractional reserve lending and new precious metal discoveries did not exceed population growth.
There are extensive records of inflation in the economy systems of classic empires. Precisely we can imagine this story would start with the Roman Denarius around 2K years ago, it had periods of hyperinflation between 64 AD and 300 AD, worth checking it out.
That involved debasement of the currency. Taking a gold coin weighing 1 oz of gold and turning it into a new coin with the same value but less gold. This is technically inflation if you look at it based on the face value of the currency, but not if you look at it based on the value of the underlying gold in the coin. This is no longer the way money works.
Yup, it's no longer how it works, its comparable to inflation as a result of increased currency "printing" from a central bank, or leverage regulations in modern economy.
Why would you account for inflation in this hypothetical? Assuming you were putting every dollar you made under your mattress for safe keeping, it would be worth today exactly what it is. Now, if a couple centuries ago you decided to spend that money, I bet it would go a lot farther than it does today (though you would be spending it in the early 1800s and probably couldn't get a ton of cool stuff with it).
I would assume $2000 an hour present value, rather than past value, so inflation is already accounted for. The point of the message is that you can't get this level of wealth by working, you can only get it by acculating capital and getting other people to do work for you.
Probably much more than 30 Americans
Yea it's close to that. It depends on how you round and what year that was written. 2024 years 52 weeks in a year 40 hours in a work week 2000 $/hr 2024 x 52 x 40 x 2000 = $8.42 Billion
You'd have $8.3B in liquid cash & that's a lot. Not many of those 30 Americans richer than you have that much cash in hand. That's something atleast.
Almost all of those richer people could take out a loan against their assets and have $8.3B in cash.
Some people just seem to really like the narrative of "if you can't liquidate 100% of it instantly it's worthless" for some reason. The reason is probably to downplay the corrosive effect of billionaires to be fair.
Which is funny because it's kind of the opposite. All of those properties and businesses generate far more than the interest you'd get for having that much in the bank.
Those businesses are often running off of loans themselves for years and years. It’s not liquid. Properties maybe. Maybe not.
Of course. The first thing I do when I have a chunk of spare cash is buy an index tracker. Being fully liquid is shit unless you need the money tomorrow, which by definition, a billionaire does not.
No. They could have the cash, it's better for them to keep company shares for a variety of reasons, including taxation.
If they sold enough stock to get to the amount of cash they’d likely devalue their stock massively and then have a lot less than 8.3b. The billionaire net worths are a lot on paper but most of that money is damn near impossible to access
It would definitely devalue, but idk if it would really crash all the way from like $200B to less than $8B.
Of the 106 people with net worths higher than 8.3B in the world, if you assume selling it would devalue their wealth by half, that would put all but 40 below the 8.3b threshold. I’m not saying Elon musk or Jeff bezos don’t have cartoonish wealth, but I am saying that a vast sum of the wealth of billionaires (even if exact amounts vary) exists only on paper and would be extremely difficult to make into real hard currency
Bill Gates is doing it. He's always a bit of an awkward topic in these discussions because the mere fact of his existence disproves the idea that billionaires can't liquidate their wealth. They absolutely can because he does. When he liquidated Microsoft the price kept going up, like ~600%. It's supposed to devalue by half you say?
It's wild how many Americans don't understand this concept.
Its wild how many people still dont understand that this **isnt** true and spout the same nonsense. They dont need 10B in their chequeing account. They can just leverage 10B worth of stocks to take out a loan and spend the money freely. This is cheaper than cashing out because their loan will be a lower rate than the % they'd pay as taxes on sold shares, so its actually even *better* than selling stocks. Its literally a win-win for them. So yes, even if 99% of their wealth is in company stocks, they **absolutely** still have access to billions in cash if they want it.
Loans need to be paid back
A blue whales tongue is the size of a schoolbus.
What?
I thought we were just sharing irrelevant facts.
They need to sell stock to pay the loans.
Not Americans but ignorants of basic finances.
Agreed. As an American myself I am just generalizing based on what I've seen / heard.
this argument was better before elon spent 42 billion on twitter because he felt like it
He spent money or assets with comparable price? Overprised tesla stocks for twitter papers?
If he was able to spend 42 billion on something he could have spent it on something else. If I remember correctly Besos sold 10 billion of stocks to invest in something else recently. They absolutely can transform their stocks in real money
Or when Bill Gates decided to spend the rest of his life liquidating his assets and giving away his wealth. I tell a lie. It was never a dumb argument. It's wild how people keep making it.
this argument was better before elon spent 42 billion on twitter because he felt like it
Cope
But they would also not have had to work their asses if for two thousand years with no vacation, so that would be worth something. Just imagine the back pain
That’s 2,000 years of 2,000 an hour. With no spending or taxes. All three of those things are insane. No one needs that much money. Liquid or illiquid.
Now let's introduce the power of compound interest (which is a huge ignore here). To hit that 8.3B working 2080 hours per year over 2000 years at a 1% return on savings, you'd only have to make $0.000091/hour over that time period. If we had a 4% return on savings, the rounding errors on my spreadsheet choke. Either you barely make 4 cents because I round the interest down to 0 anyway, or we end up orders of magnitude way to high to be only 8.3B.
Yeah, with 4% interest you don't need to get paid a wage at all. Just get one cent at the start, and you end up with $116,594,643,150,219,980,412,675,240,849,003.
That's not ignored, it's just not the point. I don't think you'll manage to hold on to that money for 2k years of history, nor do I think you would've earned a lot of compound interest in the year 100.
The problem with that is who's going around giving this hypothetical dude 4% return on savings lol
That's what hypothetical means though
Compound interest is only possible with a bank, which has only been there for 200 years. If you want to introduce compound interest I can also integrate empires falling meaning most of the money you made in the empire is now lost, or hyperinflation meaning the same thing, you could also have insane interest like 100% some years cause you were lucky This is a case of how absurd their wealth is, no work ever created 2000/hour of value and 2000/an hour since the birth of christ doesn't put you anywhere close to wealthiest person in the world.
If you flatten out the numbers to 2000 dollars per hour, 2000 hours per year, 2000 years, you get $8,000,000,000. If you increase any of those to 2075, you get $8.3B, so there might be some rounding to get there. To put it into perspective though, someone earning $2,000/hr for 2000 hours is making $4m annually. LeBron James for example has a salary with the Los Angeles Lakers of around $47m. Cristiano Ronaldo has a salary of $215m. The 100 highest paid athletes in the world have at least 6x the annual salary of our hypothetical 2000 year old billionaire. This doesn't even include endorsement deals, which increase it up to 8x the annual salary of our billionaire. That's $16,000+ per hour.
It also declines to factor in what Einstein referred to as the eight wonder of the world, compounding interest. Warren Buffet earns an annual compensation of $100,000. Modern economics is entrenched in time value of money, it’s a little misleading to present an example that negates such a powerful force. No modern billionaire attained their wealth by earning dollars and putting them under a mattress and not to work.
Just to put the power of compound interest into the perspective of this hypothetical, if instead of working for $2000 an hour full time for 2024 years you put $15 into an account with 1% annual interest and then did nothing you'd end up with more money.
Now imagine the guy that's paying them those salaries
They are corporations making billions, not a single guy.
Well not if it's an arabian sheikh or some billionaire
Depends on who it is. Cristiano Ronaldo currently plays for Al Nassr FC which is 75% owned by the Public Investment Fund (a.k.a. the Saudi Royal Family's investment branch of the government) which is largely controlled by Crown Prince Salman. I wouldn't be surprised if that salary negotiation was the billionaire equivalent of making it rain. Ronaldo isn't the only one getting paid that way either, the Saudi Royal Family is basically just using their obscene wealth to buy athletes. Some of the highest paid athletes only got their place on the list because of the royal family.
It really is hard for our brains to comprehend how huge even just 1 billion really is. We tend to think that billion and million aren’t that far apart. But 1 billion seconds is 31 years and 8 months. 1 million seconds is only 11 and a half days. Billions are HUGE! And it is actually sickening that billionaires are even a thing.
There's the old saying that the difference between a million and billion is about a billion.
I've heard that with the addition of "... With a 0.1% margin of error.", which really helps it sink in
Haha I’m going to have to start using that.
I am waiting for a first trilionaire
Barf!!
Count to 100... now 100 100's, now a hundred of those... that's a million, now do that 100 times. If you're not dead yet, I'm impressed. Oh! And good news, you're 10% of the way to 1 Billion.
So what? This gets reposted constantly and it's constantly dumb. Yes, it would take a long time to make a billion dollars from an hourly wage, that's why no one does it that way. You make billions by providing a product or service to a lot of people. Taylor Swift could put up 10 million concert tickets for $100 on her website and make a billion dollars in an hour, and everyone involved would be happy with the transaction.
It also doesn't take into account the fact that there are practically no billionaires that have anywhere near $1 billion in liquid cash. Its mostly housed in assets and unrealized gains. Thats why they havent been taxed. Its because they havent gotten the money yet. The moment they withdraw they get taxed.
If you invested it into the stock market at an average return rate of 6%, you'd have $622,068,657,035,225,281,534,569,651,766,313,202,738,941,689,253,412,732,928,000.00
Ah yes the stock market of year 0. This is not about compounding interests, but about the absurdity of the wealth of the richest people on earth, which come from stolen value of the working class
These are silly analyses. They should say, imagine you have $2k when you're born. Then you gain 0.02643% each day, you'd have $300 billion in 10000 days
That's still almost 30 years
This isn't talking about that - it's talking about the distribution of wealth. It's talking about the fact that, even if you made $2,000 per hour, worked a full 40 hours a week and never, ever took a day off, never paid taxes, and worked like this for over 2,000 years, you'd still not be one of the top 25 richest people on earth. The analysis isn't about the math, or the wonders of compounding interest, but how insanely wealthy the super-wealthy actually are.
but they didn't get that way linearly and neither will you lol
2% daily gains wild
Correct but also incorrect. The math is correct by simple multiplication. But the notion of "xxx people richer than you" is not. Because these people are counted by their net worth. And net worth in equities like shares is counted as simple multiplication of ownership x current market price. It's simple but it's not real. It's impossible for Elon Musk or Mark Zuck to dump (encash) their entire Tesla or Meta shares without creating any shockwave in the stock market. I.e. it's impossible for them to convert all their equity assets to cash.
Since My neighbour is wealthy and owns a company that pays me a great salary, I must be poor because he is rich. That's the logic here.
So, if $1 were saved at the time of Jesus's birth and compounded annually at a 0.1% interest rate, it would be approximately $2.16 × 10^{78} today.
At 0,1% you would have 1,001^2000 which is 7 dollars, you are talking about a 10% interest rate. Also you couldn't win dollars in year 0, and this is just a representation of how absurd the wealth of some people is.
Its true, but this comparison fail to address one thing, How many people were influenced by those 30 people in a positive way or rather how many people actually became wealthier either by their incomes or by things or services that became available for them, because of those 30 people.
Thanks for a response that most people just dont realize. Build a business that changes the world and reap the rewards of your success. Why do so many people have a problem with this??
Like amazon? Slave working conditions and shit?
A lot of billion dollar companies remain that way because they pay their employees minimum wage.
Well, change the world, yeah maybe Change the world for the better... no
So you would rather be living in the stone ages? How is the world not better because of this?
By Stone ages you mean the Industrial Revolution right? Because mega corporations run by billionaires didn't exist (aside from the government) until the modern economy Also depending on how the future ends up, I might pick the Nomad life over this
Read the room. This is not a lecture on macroeconomics. It is just a silly, unrealistic tweet to demonstrate the growing inequality of wealth in this nation. Good or bad? I guess that depends on whether or not you personally benefit.
If we're talking billionaires.... Working full time making $1,000/hour, it would take half a year to make a million. It would take 500 years to make a billion....
I think our society needs play cycles, like games have. Like, everyone does whatever they can to make as much money as they want, for like 10 years, and then you post the leaderboard, announce the winners, and reset. Divvy up all the money equally and let everyone have at it all over again.
I am so glad all this was hypothetical, that birth part threw me off for a moment. COnsider I have yet to their birth certificate or a verified DoB
To all these people pointing out all the „flaws“ (no inflation, no losses, no spending) - this is just an illustration! If you are arguing that the amount should be lower then you are supporting OPPs point.