In all honesty I’ve been getting slightly bored of the same old, same old every week with my blog. This week, I wanted to stay relatively on topic while doing something that would be refreshing for both myself and yourself. Instead of blogging about a billionaire who did something somehow to make a billion dollars and is now distinct in some manner, I decided I’m just going to talk about a billion dollars.
What is a billion dollars? The simplest answer is $1,000,000,000.00, but I am going to just a few more to give you some perspective and appreciation. After all, money is just paper and the true value come with what you can buy with it. The other thing to consider is that not all money is created equal. For example, the average American makes about a billion Iranian dollars or “rial” every year. But if we are going to try to consider all of that it will just tangle us in an uncertain web of complicated economics I’d rather not venture into. So I will simply focus on the American dollar and its buying power (it is generally regarded as the world standard anyhow). Also remember this is just one billion dollars. Keep in mind that everyone I have discussed thus far in my blog has at least a magnitude more than this. Anyways, here goes…
100,000,000,000 pennies
1,000,000,000 one dollar bills
200,000,000 five dollar bills
50,000,000 twenty dollar bills
20,000,000 fifty dollar bills
10,000,000 benjamins
But really of these numbers still don’t give us any perspective on what a billion dollars really is, and trust me, it’s a a lot. So here are a few more tangible things a billion dollars can represent.
Enough to send 6,642 kids to a Harvard for 4 years
Enough to attend Penn State for 58,823 years
A fleet of 476 Bugatti Veyrons
A fleet of 17 Boeing 757s
1,111,111 Macbook Pros
4,000,000 iPhone 5cs
100,100,100 Rubik’s Cubes
Penn State season football tickets for the next 4,545,454 years
10 of your very own Beaver Stadium’s
3 White Houses (like where the president lives)
4,545 Ferrari 458 Italias
Now before I continue, I encourage you to actually read these numbers a time or two and think about them. It’s very easy to just look at the numbers without actually thinking about how grotesque they are. So I’m going to try to scale down the numbers even more so they really hit home.
You could spend $31.71 every single second for an entire year
That means you could buy a decent used car every minute for an entire year
A house (or a Aston Martin Vantage V8 depending on what tickles your fancy) every hour for an entire year
A jet every day for an entire year
Or maybe just go on a $20 million shopping spree once per week for a year, like a Saudi prince did just a few months ago at Disneyland Paris (yes, it actually happened)
Or even buy a new sports team every month for a year
And I think the most depressing stat… What a billion dollars can’t do for you, help America’s debt… Well I mean it would chip away 0.00586% of it
So it’s crazy to think of what you could do with a billion dollars. Please fill free to comment below with serious, funny, or creative ways to spend a billion dollars.
That’s so ridiculous I can’t even imagine having that much money. If someone handed me a billion dollars the first thing I’d do was probably divie it up amongst my family. I promised my dad if I get filthy rich I’d buy him a mansion in the Alps so there’s a couple million. Then I’d probably give my parents a few million more for all the money they’ve spent on me over the years and so they can retire. Then I’d give a couple million each to my closest relatives. Then I would buy a Lamborghini Aventador, a few awesome houses around the world, and the fastest private jet in the world to take me to them. And of course I can’t forget exotic animals. I’d probably buy a nested timandua (look it up they’re so cool) and absolutely a sloth. And maybe like a lion pup so I can befriend it and it can be like a dog. So total that’s probably around $100 million so far. Then I’d keep around $5 million for myself for the future and give the remaining to various charities. And that would make me pretty darn happy.
Someone once asked me how I would change the world with 10 dollars. I thought that was a little ridiculous because that’s not a lot of money. I asked it to my friend, the president of Innoblue (club dealing with innovation). And he said that $10 wasn’t enough either, he’d need 10 million. Looking back on that, I don’t think 10 million is nearly enough. It was interesting how you put this into perspective.
Check out this video I found yesterday. It’s about money and classes being put into perspective
http://www.utrend.tv/v/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact/
Loved reading this–it really helped put 1 billion dollars in perspective for me, because you’re right, it’s a hard concept to understand. I still can’t imagine having that much money, though… I think maybe I’d spend it on traveling, so the buying one jet a day thing might come into play there.