Linear growth < exponential growth
So… Basic math…?
The main difference is that you work at a linear rate, but can exploit others at an exponential rate.
I don’t think this was meant for, obviously, really smart people like you. It is to give a sense of scale that a working person understands. The concept of a billion dollars isn’t easy for most people to actually comprehend.
In a video game, whatever allowed them to become billionaires would have been called an “exploit” and would have been nerfed in the next patch.
In '00s games, sure.
In '20s games, it would be part of the Pay2Win scheme and only available to players who have rich parents.
Our universe is abandon ware?
Worse, our society is
Lemmy discovers deism. ;)
TIL.
This is about as close as I’ve ever seen anything come to what I believe in. I usually tell people I’m an atheist because it’s easier than trying to explain what I actually believe.
This is pretty much spot on. Thanks.
Okay so then how is he worth that much?
These memes and stories are like, “its unbelievable that Bezos is worth so much money”, no it makes perfect sense!
Recipe for a billionaire includes:
- (optional) being born wealthy
- Exploitation of others
- luck
Billionaires like to think they worked hard but in reality they exploited others and were lucky in some form or another. Exploitation comes from paying workers as little as possible and/or having such terrible work conditions to maximize efficiency to the point that who cares if someone dies working. Fighting unions and keeping costs down (including pay) means more profit. It also means you can charge less to force other competitors out of business unless they can do the same amount of exploiting to keep costs down.
Beyond that, there’s just general business and economic concepts like operating at scale which luck or generational wealth can help shortcut there.
Being born wealthy isn’t really optional. It’s actually necessary and a big reason why this system is so absolutely terrible, because the American dream is a capitalist myth to manipulate the masses.
The exceptions are not always exceptions, like the apartheid boy Elon and the 1 in a million that actually is an exception is drilled into our brains by the media like how gambling companies make ads about the people that win the lottery.
Okay so then how is he worth that much?
Easy: He birthed himself into a rich family. Classical self made billionaire
His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers
His parents were employees, not business owners.
But his parents weren’t super rich billionaires, were they? No one had a hundred billion dollars before, he didnt get it all from his parents, where did he get it all?
Amazon has been really successful in several domains and he’s owned a lot of it from the start
How does owning something turn into hundreds of billions of dollars? I own things too, they don’t turn into hundreds of billions
Your things didn’t increase in perceived value as much as Amazon then
Is that how value is determined? How others perceive value? Isn’t that kind of subjective? Is there a possibility he isn’t worth that much money? Could he be worth even more? Not like margin of error, but dramatically more or less like 20-30% off one way or the other?
The value is tecknically the effect of what is called a stock market, and it does vary quite a bit over time as perceptions and economic factors change
You need to own stuff that others value
I’m sorry to ask such elementary questions, but why do others value it?
It’s not an elementary question.
Best I can guess is: plenty of people, plenty of reasons. Which is a stupid answer.
The answer is hard work.
Not his own hard work, obviously, the the hard work of the workers he exploited
Totally agree. How does the hard work become his hundreds of billions?
amazon grows its revenue → amazon stock value increases → amazon share holder richer
Many companies also pay dividends directly to the share holder but iirc Amazon has preferred to reinvest in growth
The other user said it was exploited labor, what does that have to do with revenue and stock value?
Those are the vehicles that transfer the plunder.
No but if you start with millions and invest it or make interest on it you have a lot more options and opportunities to make more money.
If you start with nothing you are just blocked out of that all together. It’s why I’m having such a hard time starting my own business. I have to pay all my bills so my time goes to that instead of what would actually make me successful.
What kind of business do you want to start?
I’m an artist of sorts. I make interactive art kind of like games so I want to open a gallery space with a bar where I can have people come and try my experiences.
They are similar to arcade games but they have physical dioramas with transparent screens inside as the game levels. You control your character or whatever the game calls for with your phone. My current iteration uses multiple screens and diorama as well as physical objects for a single experience. Kind of like a Metroidvania style game.
I have so many ideas for larger experiences I could build with all of the stuff I have learned making these crazy games. My goal would be to make an experience that takes about an hour to complete. Similar to an escape room except you’re not locked in a room. Maybe more tiki bar vibes where the scenery of the bar is interactive too.
All of my free time when I’m not working or doing family stuff goes into making the art for these games and it’s hard to then come up with the time and money to get a space and advertise. Plus I have a family to support. So I work full time as a software engineer making someone else’s boring idea. While my fun innovative ideas get less of my attention lol.
I feel my only hope is to get an investor or something but then I have to deal with all that comes with that.
Wow do you have any of it already created? Can I see it?
Plenty of people in that situation who aren’t Bezos rich, no?
Makes me think that explanation isn’t sufficient.
It’s not sufficient, but it is necessary. They also have to invest (AKA owning the means of production, wonder why that’s so profitable…)
It’s not sufficient, but it is necessary
It certainly helps a lot!
But again, there’s something different about them. that made them different from many others from a similar start.
Wonder what it could be
Not having a conscience, probably
But if you made just 3% interest on your money as you deposit $1,825,000 annually, over 532 years, you’d end up having $410 trillion dollars or more than 2,000 bezos.
That’s why these posts are stupid to me.
Same. There’s no gold standard, money is a social construct.
I wonder if the people who think like this, also assume “if bezos had less money, I’d have more”.
yeah but 1.8 mil 532 years ago would have been valued like billions today. so you still need to be a billionaire to become that rich
Not really with that amount of time. Suppose you put away $1,000 a year for 532 years, at 3% you still end up with $225 billion.
The deposits are completely dwarfed by the compounding interest. If you only start with $1,000 and add nothing else but let that original $1,000 compound at 4% you’ll have over $1 trillion.
Where are you getting 4% annual compound returns, though? That’s faster than the historical growth in global GDP over the equivalent time period.
Yes, it’s equally as unrealistic as leaving money idle for 532 yrs.
The only point I was making was that multiplying $5,000 a day by so many years is a silly comparison as it ignores the dominating factors to building wealth.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist but also they don’t exist because they stuff X dollars under their mattress every day.
2000 Bezos or about 4x the GDP of the planet.
People just need to invest and stop blaming others for being broke SMH.
Invest one penny at 3% per year, who can’t afford one penny? You’ll have $68 billion in just one thousand years. Poverty is a choice.
This shit right here is why ancient Vampire Investment Bankers are so insufferable.
That might explain the zuckerberg skin complexion. Facebook was just him cataloging the local bloodbank.
Specially the ones who invest in BiteCoin
Interest is insane when you think about it
Yeah, I had to go down to 3% for it to even make sense.
That’s why it’s smart to park money in high-interest assets (like index funds). Of course, you need to be in a position to save money.
And in a position to be able to lose it. High interest are high because they are risky, so they have to pay well to attract investing. If you already have enough money to burn, you can put money into various high risk areas and win overall. If you only have enough to sink it into a single source, you could gain. Or not.
Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis
As long as you keep that money in index funds like MSCI World, S&P500 or DAX, you can wait out the bad times. Never sell, keep holding. Over decades this leads to large net profits.
If you already have enough money to burn, you can put money into various high risk areas and win overall.
That’s the angel investor strategy.
There’s also lower risk index funds, that simply invest in the biggest N companies.
you just need to have unlimited time, at 3% annual interest, it takes 77.89 years to 10x your money. it just happens that 532 years is 6.8 times 77.89 years, therefore you would just put a 1 million multiplier on your money anyways. And putting 1 million multiplier on 1 million dollars is enough to become a trillionaire anyways
At 3% interest, you double your money every 23.4 years, how many 23.4 years do you have?
thats why investments are inportant for long term. the problem we face as a society is that the majority of people cant afford to make these investments, as they are living day to day with their paychecks.
I mean its worse than that. Youd need to work at a rate of 16,600/hr, 24 hours a day for 2,000 years to get even close to Elon Musk
But if you got $5000 at 0.7% yearly interest rate for 2000 years, you’d get to Musk’s wealth. You can only get that high with compound interest with investments, rather than earning money.
For the curious you’d make 970million in the 532years. Jeff bozos net worth is about 200 billion. You’d need an annual interest rate of about 2.12% to reach 200billion over that period, assuming you spend none of it, if you took an annual income of 20k then you’d only be at 135billion at the end of the period.
so i couldn’t even spend any of it ?
that’s rubbish billionaire. unless i could use it to leverage banks to give me loans off of national credit programs.
and still then i’d just prefer not to.
i feel badly for people who can’t get ever seem to get enough.
Although if you did earn $5k per day and managed to invest at a yearly return of 3% above interest, youd have about $410 trillion
At 1% above interest you’d just have $36 billion so invest wisely
Did they have computers and future technology back then?
Rockefeller didn’t have them either
I bet for a long while you’d be like, “What even are dollars?”, since they hadn’t been invented yet.
Nevermind dollars. What about inflation? $5000/day in 1900 would be worth $187,000 today. That’s $68M/year.
You’d need, what? 15 years to get a billion at that rate. You’d also be accusing money faster than Rockefeller.
I have to wonder where all that wealth would even be coming from.
Presumably the same place real rich people get it today. Gradually inflating the currency so that even if they’re not directly stealing from you the increase in their wealth comes from the lessening of value of your, mine, and everyone elses money.
Gradually inflating the currency
Gradual inflation that happens under the national growth rate is fine. You need more currency moving at a faster rate in an expanding economy.
Gradual inflation in a contracting national growth rate is a huge problem.
Thomas Picketty lays this all out mathematically in “Capitalism in the 21st Century”, and builds a strong economic case for a high graduated tax rate as a means of tying inflation back to real economic growth.
You’d also be accusing money faster than Rockefeller.
It was the 20 dollar bill that killed the butler, with a candelabra in the hall!
I think you have to deflate to the year to make it equal to $5k today. For instance, if we go back to 1635, we’re looking at $131.62/day
kinda makes you think. billionaires should not exist.
100% and, more so, thats not just a billion in cash, of course. Thats a billion dollars worth of stuff that makes you money, that can be sold off for at least a billion, most likely far more.
When people read these valuations, they often think to themselves “surely they can’t be worth that much” and they’re right. It will always be much, much more. Other than Trump, wealth valuations are always very, very conservative, due to the nature of how they do it, and thats before we get to the fact that they’re only estimating their wealth on the assets that are publicly disclosed.
Virtually everyone fails to grasp exactly how large of a number a billion is. It’s so, so much bigger than the ”very big number” people think of when they hear the word.
I wonder if world class mathematicians have a much better grasp of it — and yet fail to use their expertise to point out the absurdity of the current wealth inequality
Or do even they, world class mathematicians, not really ‘grasp’ it in this wildly important and urgent sense.
In my experience mathematicians don’t really concern themselves with numbers between 2 and infinity.
A million seconds is a little over 11 days.
A billion seconds is a little over 31 years.
Billionaires should be required to count out their dollars individually every few days.
While having someone scream random numbers at them as they count. Fuck em!
The difference between one million and one billion is roughly one billion.
Why’s that?
Big brain chuds: But what if you used that money to exploit the labor of others?
This is a few years old but still a good visualisation:
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Start scrolling.
And do not miss https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md
Love this guy’s work
I love that this guy decided that GitHub is the place to share his socio-economic essay. Next to a guy who used it for his sourdough guides my favourite use of GitHub yet.
Wow. This is another level of doomscrolling. Very educational though
Does anything happen after “we cannot accept this level of inequality any longer” ? I stopped at 500 billion.
No. It just keeps scrolling and eventually stops at 3.2 trillion
That why you should have invested that 969 million usd in bitcoin
/s
Okay but in fairness if you put like 1% of that money virtually anywhere but under your matress you’d probably be richer than Bezos now. Even at like 3% interest of a $18,250 compunded over 530 years you’d have about half of Bezos’ net worth.
Talking about billionaires … it almost seems quaint as we barrel towards having actual trillionaires.
What a failure of society
I have a hard enough time getting my head around how much money $100B is already. Like, I don’t even see numbers above the hundreds of thousands ever (usually on loans, like my mortgage), so the idea that some of these people could buy my house 100,000+ times over, and I will spend years, paying for it once, is hard enough.
Wealth hoarding has gotten way out of hand.
Huh. Based on this online calculator(https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator), if i earn £5000 everyday in 1493(Cuntopher Columbus start his slave trading voyage in 1492 i think), i would have £1,825,000, which in today money is roughly £1,813,589,780.47, that’s just for a single year.
Kinda made me the richest immortal in the world.
that is obviously just an analogy for the huge time span. $5000/day meaning at the current value
Yes, under those conditions you’d have about $969 million: 531 years since 1493. $5000 x 365 = $1825000 per year x 531 = $969,075,000
According to this article Jeff Bezos makes $595,728,000 a week (holy shit), so even if you were Methuselah earning $5000 a day, he’d still have more money than you after two weeks 😱
As in Jeff Bezos’s assetts appreciate at 600M a day. To reiterate the OP’s point.
That is a dangerous amount of power concentration.
Was Columbus trading slaves?
He enslaved people as he travelled
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/us/christopher-columbus-slavery-disease-trnd/index.html
Didn’t everybody back then?
I’m sure it was very common. But that’s whataboutism and it’s definitely worth noting.
If you’re going to adjust the final amount for inflation then you need to adjust the £5000 for inflation so in 1493 you would only be earning £6 per day.
I don’t think the original poster meant you to ‘adjust for inflation’. Good thinking tho!
