Millionaires are two-a-penny now! Anyone who has saved up enough to buy a house, then has been left one by a parent has a good chance of being a millionaire.
Can millionaires actually be quite hard up? Imagine you have a biggish house in London, that you inherited from your parents. But you are now retired with only the state pension. You should really sell the house, but you grew up in it. It’s full of “your life” It needs repair but you can’t afford it. But it’s in a desirable area and it’s worth £1million. Yep. you are a hard up millionaire.
But a billionaire is worth 1000 millionaires.
According to Forbes, the USA has 928 billionaires. They are cumulatively worth $7.8 Trillion.
The UK has only 56 and they are worth $244 Billion.
Now the “poor” ones are only worth one billion dollars, but the median billionaire is worth $3billion in the USA, and $2.6billion in the UK. (Elon Musk is worth $476billion)
So what is a billionaire? Let’s keep it in dollars, it’s someone whose net worth is over a billion dollars. (For older readers, a billion nowadays is a thousand million, not million million as it was originally defined.)
Getting a billion dollars into perpective.
If you start counting now, at 1 count per second, you will reach 1 billion in 32 years. It’s a big number.
You’ll need 15,000 years to count Elon Musks dollars. (continuous counting 24 hrs per day)
Or, do you drive a car? A car’s engine goes around at an average rate of 3000 revolutions per minute and your average speed throughout the cars life will be around 45mph.
If you have a magic car and every time the engine rotates (thats 50 times a second) you make $1 you will have to travel 250,000 miles to make a billion dollars. Manage 119 million miles and you will have as much as Elon Musk.
The median net worth of a US or UK citizen (they are probably half way through their mortgage) is $192,000. So a median billionaire is worth the same as around 16,000 US or UK “normal” citizens.
While most of a billionaire’s worth is tied up in ownership of companies etc, a sizeable amount is spent on multiple homes, cars, yachts, private aircraft, and lawyers fees.
When this billionaire gives a million dollars to charity, it’s the same percentage as a “normal” citizen giving $64, except that the normal citizen will probably notice the $64, and the billionaire does not miss the odd million. Of course it won’t cost him a million as he will get a lot of tax relief on it – almost 50% in the UK (with gift aid).
Along with this obscene wealth, come obscene power. The USA in particular is a very litigious country, (the UK is catching up) and in disputes between individuals, billionaires always win as they hire the best (and most unscrupulous) lawyers and either win, or drag out the case until the other party is bankrupt.
