Count to a Billion

How I began to grasp the atrocity of Musk

By Susan Duerksen

One of the gazillion fundraising texts I got today started with the factoid that billionaires at Trump's inauguration have a combined net worth of $1.2 TRILLION.

The word trillion was in ALL-CAPS and bold, emphasizing that it is a very big number. Which of course I already knew.

The problem is, I have no gut sense of it. I do understand numbers, and have a strong gut sense of the difference between two cats and 20 cats in a house, or trying to carry one apple or 50 apples. I can picture a bag of 50 apples, and I'm going to drive to that shopping errand.

But trillion is just an 8-letter word. It's one letter longer than billion or million, but shares six of its letters with them, and in the exact same order. All three words rhyme pleasantly. Billion and million are practically the same word, but for those little b-m characters. People talk about "millionaires and billionaires” like a blended soup of rich people. What's the difference once the number gets that big? That's why we need words like gazillion.

Here is how I finally found a sense of the magnitude of evil that is a billionaire.

We can all agree that a millionaire has puh-lenty of money. How much? Let's count it in seconds, because we all experience time. Everybody can sense the short little blip of one second.

If each dollar is a second, $1 million is 11.6 days.

So, to count 1 million seconds, we would have to keep at it nonstop, around the clock, for 11 days and nights plus another 14 hours. No thank you!

Now, what about a billion? If a million seconds are almost 12 days, what do you think? A billion must be weeks or months.

Nope. This math is doable: 1 billion seconds add up to almost 32 years. YEARS. 32 of them.

12 days ago was the Friday before last. 32 years ago was 1993, when we had just inaugurated Bill Clinton and the Internet was a spanking new novelty. Billionaires are at a very different level of atrocity than millionaires.

It gets worse. Elon Musk reportedly has $427.5 billion. Counting in seconds, that one twisted punk is hoarding 13,552 years.

Here's where the gut sense starts to break down. I have no idea what was happening 135 centuries ago. I can't grasp how much time that is – except that it’s almost seven times as long as all the history since Jesus was walking around. Repeat everything since Jesus seven times and you’ve got Musk’s wealth.

So the gargantuan question is why this is legal. When most Americans are lucky to have a couple days worth of dollar-seconds – and most people in the world much less – why in the hell do we let one person own 135 centuries? We are all born with equal human rights, sharing life on our one common planet, and this is how we divide the planet’s resources?

This insanity isn't just theoretically reprehensible, it's the root of pain and destruction everywhere. Let's get started tearing it down. Taxing billionaires down to mere millionaires is one way to start reclaiming our rights and taking care of each other. They won't like it, but they’re outnumbered. By several billion.

***

Originally posted at: