say you have 100 million dollars. you invest it very safely and conservatively and get a return of 5% per year. you now have a permanent income of 5 million a year, without doing anything to maintain it. 5 million a year is $13,700 per day.

if I were forced to try to spend on average $13,700 a day, I don't know how I would do it without just giving most of it away. even after I'd satisfied my wildest fantasies there would be so much left over. to have that level of wealth and continue trying to get more should be treated as a mental illness

and that's only 1% of 1%, i.e. one 10,000th, of a trillion dollars

If you were born in the year 1AD and made $1,000,000 every day without ever spending a penny, you would still be hundreds of billions short of a trillion.

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

Athletes are among the people who earn the highest salaries based on their abilities and talents. The top athletes earn more than the top Hollywood stars. The English Premier League has the highest total wage bill of any futbol / soccer league on the planet. Paying Manchester City's wage bill costs £300m per year, the club with the lowest wage bill was Burnley at only £70m/year. Sum up every team and you get £2.7 billion per year, or $3.6 billion. That's less than 1% of $1 trillion. If you took $1 trillion in cash and set it aside, never adding anything to it, you could pay the wages of all those clubs for centuries.

It's enough to spend $1 every second for 31,709 years.

I keep seeing breakdowns like this and have a hard time imagining accumulating $1M in my lifetime, let alone spending $1M annually over several consecutive human eras. Here's something I find easier to wrap my head around:

$500k ≈ The average single family home. To most people, this is the end game. The American Dream, realized.

$1M ≈ Two of those homes. A primary residence and a vacation home/entry to the landlord class.

$1B ≈ 2000 of those homes. If the average urban block contains 20 of those homes, that's 100 blocks. Looking at my home city, that's the entirety of a large neighborhood district.

$1T ≈ 2,000,000 of those homes. About half the states in the US have less than 2M in housing units built, including non-single family homes.

I did the maths on this recently in anticipation of this horrible event.

If you were the first human ever born, about 300,000 years ago, and you saved $10,000 a day without ever spending a penny, you would only recently have crossed the 1,000,000,000,000 mark.

Also there really should be an emoji for the guillotine.

No its fine bro! We can still have money bro! This is a reasonable way of organizing a society its labor and its physical resources, bro! Just one more grotesque abomination of decadence while the furnaces go cold the people are exhausted the soil is depleted and children die of hunger on the open street because we paid to tear down their tents and lock up the dumpsters, bro! Just one more bro! Just one more and then we can fix capitalism, bro! Fix it with market reforms and gentle nudges, bro! Nothing to harsh, bro!

That's why rich people are bad people. If you are at the capacity to easily mitigate suffering in the world, but won't do it for personal enrichment, you're an asshole.

You could spend a million dollars every day until you died of old age and still die a billionaire. A trillion is a truly incomprehensible amount of wealth.

Is this referencing something?

lol I don’t expect humanity to use money in the next 500 yrs.

bUt It'S aLl In sHarEs aNd hE WorKeD fOr iT

So... Are you saying that those children should have to live with only one million dollars a year? Poor kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYJ5ZViYhHQ

Although I think the guillotine may be too nice of a punishment for the billionaires or more....

What does modern human civilization even mean ?

Humans have a history long enough to have been almost wiped off the planet excepting a few thousand of us and came back with 8 billion plus strong.

Crassus was the wealthiest Roman during the age of Caesar but who the fuck cares about Crassus ?

NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT CRASSUS.

Empires make the eventual "wealthiest person in history" over and over again. These calculations happen over and over again. I'm tired of clowning the current King of Fools. Daenerys was right. Break the fucking wheel, burn the broken wheel, because the ending of this series is gonna be a disappointment and suck, too.

Here's where it's really dangerous. The spending in the 2020 election cycle in the US was the highest in history. The $18 billion spent was more than twice as much as the $8.5 billion in 2016 and even more than the $14.8 billion from 2024.

If Elon Musk wanted to go dollar-for-dollar with every ad dollar spent in the US, on every congressional race, mayor's race, and, of course, every presidential candidate from the moment they're just considering running to the day of the election, he could do it without even noticing. Even if he converted all his shares to cash and put them in an ultra-safe savings account that only paid 5% per year, he'd be bringing in $50 billion per year. So, a $18 billion election campaign would be a small fraction of his yearly income (especially given that it only happens every 4 years). In fact, if he saved up for 4 years and had $200b to spend every time there was a presidential election, he could outspend everybody else by a ratio of 10:1 without difficulty.

Now, what do you think he's actually going to spend to make sure that there are never any laws passed that threaten his wealth? And, if he doesn't think he's going to get the results he wants with his political spending alone, what else might he do with tens of billions per year outside the political system?

Remember, this is just his "pocket money", this isn't even dipping into his wealth so much that it actually might go down year-to-year.

I mentioned in a previous comment that at today's prices with a billion dollars I could comfortably support my family for ten thousand years.

With a trillion dollars, I could have been comfortably supporting my family since mammoths began to exist, and still have 5.2 million years' worth of savings.

Dollars have only been around like 200 years. Assuming they'll be around in 200 years is maybe a bit of a farce. This goes triple for things like bitcoin that have even higher overhead costs.

yeah but what if trillionares could be robbed by a linux terminal command. gotcha you consie.

"modern human civilization" is also a pretty big range. Electricity alone is a rounding error in terms of how long we've been around.

Or, if you had 20 kids, you could pay them $1.6m a year until half of them revolt and set the galaxy on fire in the year 30k

Weird how those "unrealized gains" are never real enough to tax, but are always real enough to use as collateral for more cheap capital.