People have a hard time conceptualizing really big numbers, and a billion is a really big number. If you put $1B into a fixed rate investment earning 5% annually, you'd be getting $50M a year just from that. Most investments in the market do much better than that. So if she kept just (just!) $10B of what she got, she could easily be getting back well over $500M without doing anything at all. Every year, forever. If she doesn't spend or give away that much, then what she gets back grows.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
$1M in $100 bills weighs 10 kilos. $1B in $100 bills weighs 10,000 kilos.
Yes, one thousand times one million is one billion.
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To imagine the huge difference between a billion and a million I always liked the example - a million seconds is roughly 11.7 days, a billion seconds is around 31.7 YEARS.
I prefer the "having 10,000$ is one step on the stairs" image.
Most people will never be on the first step, apart from people in industrialized countries and even then, not everyone.
A millionaire will be about 100 steps up, or about 4 floors. Ah ha! Look at you all small down there from my 4th floor vantage point!
Then a billionaire, in that same analogy, is 100,000 steps up, or 11 miles, somewhere in the fucking stratosphere. Think they can see the difference between you and the millionaire from up there?
Musk, at 680,000,000,000$? He's passed the fucking ISS, 750 miles from the Earth, basically wealth stops having any kind of meaning or human scale.
“You need to “earn” 1300 dollar per hour from the moment of birth to almost be a billionaire at 30 years old” - another way to perceive it.
You need to “earn” 317.10 dollar per second ($1.14 million per hour) around the clock to become a trillionaire at 100 years old.
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Yeah, that's a good one.
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What about having $1bil and giving away $1mil is like having $1k and giving away a $1.
Also a good one
Except that the 1$ i give. I can imagine using it, just like i can imagine using the other 999$.
Billionaires have more money than they can imagine using, it's completely insane
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I always say to people "how long is one million seconds?"
The answer is 11.5 days.
Then i say "how long is a billion seconds?"
The answer is 31.7 YEARS.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire.
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Such a small fraction of their net worth would change my life that it’s equivalent to pennies you might find in your sofa. Like not even millions or hundreds of thousands, but a thousand. A thousand would be life changing to me right now, and that’s .0001 of their worth.
Nobody should have that kind of money. Slay the dragons.
Every fact I scrolled past and read on that made me more depressed while slowly raising my blood pressure.
Throw the rich in a ditch.
It gets annoying and boring to scroll. But that’s the whole point. Keep scrolling and it gets so much worse.
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MacKenzie Scott actually helped found Amazon, she married Bezos before Amazon even existed and literally worked on it with him from the very beginning. The whole idea that she married into wealth or "got it from the divorce" reeks of sexism.
She's also rapidly giving away her money with no strings attached, and she's supporting underserved communities all over the US. The HBCU in my city got a massive grant from her that's totally transformed what it will be capable of, for example. I just don't get why you're choosing this person to rag on out of all the truly vile billionaires out there
I don't see it as ragging on her. I think she is being used as an example as she has given away more in proportion to her total wealth than most other billionaires yet is now worth more than ever. The point I believe this meme is making is billionaires will still continue to be obscenely rich even if they are heavily taxed.
I see it as pointing out that even after giving away around 2/3rds of her wealth, the remaining third managed to generate more than what was given away.
In other words, an example of the axiom that you need money in order to make money, and if you have an obscene amount like $10 billion , it can double itself easily without any real effort on your part required
I respect her contributions and philanthropy. I just don’t think essential social support should depend on the generosity of billionaires instead of stable public systems.
No argument here
No human needs a billion dollars. It's an utterly obscene amount of money and just because you give away $26 billion does not mean that the remaining 10 billion is an acceptable amount to keep.
I don't disagree, but my points still stand
If I were a billionaire I would be careful about where to give my money. Like that would be my full-time job. You always hear about organizations that spend most of contributions on overhead and have overpaid CEOs, like Goodwill. I'd want to lay eyes on every place I gave to so I could be reassured it's not another org that just shifts money around.
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A million seconds is 11 days or so. A billion seconds is 31 YEARS.
just to put it in perspective of how big a billion truly is
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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 billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
And she’s actively trying to give it all away and she’s doing it faster than other “philanthropists.” She didn’t start a foundation which will hoard most of it and give a tiny (legal minimum) away each year but is instead makimg direct gifts. She also isn’t giving small gifts to small organizations to help them grow, she’s making big gifts to big orgs that can handle the money.
And despite all of this is continues to grow too rapidly.
Can she give me a small gift? Really anything more than what I have now would be nice but $1mil would be really cool?
I agree. I could do a lot of good in my community with just $1 million.
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And Jeff has given away $0. That guy is truly the scum of the earth.
he married a reptile queen to, he married a plastic doll that likely wont challenge or sue him like mackenzie woud. and his networth is like 300bn right now. up from 70bn before the pandemic.
What are you even going to do with a billion dollars? I can't even think of what I will do with a million dollars other than buying a comfy home for my family instead of living in a small congested apartment.
Actually a billion is very hard to spend if the rule is for personal use. You can do it by buying super yacht or private jet but other than that, there's nothing much you can do with that amount of money if you're a decent person.
But for altruism purpose, i can think of many, many stuff.
A million is easy to think about and honestly disappears pretty quickly compared to a billion. Between student debt, medical bills, private debt of various types, I'd eat up 100K in an afternoon alone. Then buying house somewhere else I'd like to live would take a huge chunk out of that. I'd have a much better setup than I do now but it'd be gone within a few years.
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What are you even going to do with a billion dollars?
Compensate for your insecurities
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There are no ethical billionaires.
Can’t remember his name (which was his point), but there was one who donated all but 1 million to causes, and left in his will that everything should be donated. All anonymously. He said nobody needs more than a million, and didn’t want to be named in things.
He was the only one who seemed to get it, and I can’t remember his name, which seemed to be what he wanted. All the rest are snakes.
Chuck Feeney. An actual role-model to follow if you become uber-wealthy.
Though he was never uber wealthy (because he chose not to be) but the woz donates his meagre wealth to schools and museums. He could have been Elon musk wealthy but he chose not to.
Woz is a good guy in person. I met him at a design conference in the early aughts. He seemed like a very down to earth person, happy to answer questions, and just nice.
I've never met him, but he was on /. recently and he seemed like a good person. I wish him well
Also note that those “charities” are just slush funds for their friends and is just a tool to reduce their tax liability. They need to remove remove the tax write off for charitable donations and just give more money to social programs.
This post is about Mackenzie Scott. No, that's not at all what the charities she's donating to are.
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she also refused to be named on any buildings after her, its only way to know you are genuine. unlike zuckerberg who donated to SFGH, TO name it after himself.
TBH so long as they are donating I don't particularly mind if they want shit named after them, though I'd prefer if that money just came from being taxed so we don't have to rely on billionaire largesse. Plenty of Carnegie libraries out there to this day.
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