You could spend a million dollars every day until you died of old age and still die a billionaire. A trillion is a truly incomprehensible amount of wealth.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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I keep seeing breakdowns like this and have a hard time imagining accumulating $1M in my lifetime, let alone spending $1M annually over several consecutive human eras. Here's something I find easier to wrap my head around:
$500k ≈ The average single family home. To most people, this is the end game. The American Dream, realized.
$1M ≈ Two of those homes. A primary residence and a vacation home/entry to the landlord class.
$1B ≈ 2000 of those homes. If the average urban block contains 20 of those homes, that's 100 blocks. Looking at my home city, that's the entirety of a large neighborhood district.
$1T ≈ 2,000,000 of those homes. About half the states in the US have less than 2M in housing units built, including non-single family homes.
Weird how those "unrealized gains" are never real enough to tax, but are always real enough to use as collateral for more cheap capital.
bUt It'S aLl In sHarEs aNd hE WorKeD fOr iT
That's why rich people are bad people. If you are at the capacity to easily mitigate suffering in the world, but won't do it for personal enrichment, you're an asshole.
say you have 100 million dollars. you invest it very safely and conservatively and get a return of 5% per year. you now have a permanent income of 5 million a year, without doing anything to maintain it. 5 million a year is $13,700 per day.
if I were forced to try to spend on average $13,700 a day, I don't know how I would do it without just giving most of it away. even after I'd satisfied my wildest fantasies there would be so much left over. to have that level of wealth and continue trying to get more should be treated as a mental illness
and that's only 1% of 1%, i.e. one 10,000th, of a trillion dollars
if I were forced to try to spend on average $13,700 a day, I don't know how I would do it without just g
We don't know how to do it, because we haven't seen the shit that rich people get up to and what they pay.
Sleep in a four seasons suite and drink fancy wine and I think that's pretty much it.
Still even I would probably be able to save money if I got 14k a day. Eat the rich.
A while ago, I got a green party hat in Runescape that I sold in the marketplace for around 930 million gold. After I got all the gear I needed, I still had around 930 million. I didn't know what to do with it, so what I ended up doing was going around to random players, especially newer, lower level players, and I was handing out 5-20 million stacks to them. I did this to probably about 100 or so players and I still have 400 million. I don't know what to do with it.
Must have been a pretty cool hat
The partyhats were a limited time item available through the consumption of "Christmas Crackers", which you had to open with another player. They were only available for one season way back, and were tradeable. Because they could be traded to other players, and because they were limited, they shot up in price, and their cost only grew as inflation occurred.
I had the goal once of gaining enough gold to purchase the cheapest color (purple, coincidentally my favorite), and by the time I had enough gold, the price had risen by 100x what I had saved.
The company has made a point to not allow any limited-time items to be tradeable since.
Can I haz a gud raider shield plz?
Stop thinking about the numbers. Think about what money functionally is.
Money, once you're rich enough to get/give serious loans not having to do with your immediate needs (food, shelter, etc), is planning points. Its voting shares in how we organize the world. Explicitly, by design, our production and use of resources. Implicitly, and more recently in some places explicitly, our culture.
Do you want a system in which this man has that? Do you want a system in which a mentally I'll ketamine addicted Nazi with an IQ that wouldn't crack room temp in Celsius could ever be given such an outsized say in how the world works?
Do you think the next hundred richest assholes are better?
Do you think this is worth the promise, already broken, that if you work hard and save youll be able to sleep inside and have an otherwise nice life?
The promise that there will be men with guns to protect whatever table scraps you've managed to snap up from less able scavengers who might envy your station in life?
Do you think any part of these systems, this market fetishism, is rational, or has connection with reality? Is there a single place 'market' solutions have been applied that didn't make everything it touched shitty, surreal, or both?
Vote blue no matter who, or this happens again.
I do agreed with your point, but I find your rhetoric a bit perplexing. If you want to invoke rationalism, maybe don't prelude that with egregious exaggerations like 'room temperature in Celsius IQ' (20-25)? Also, all of that working up just to land on "Vote blue no matter who" - which basically amounts to harm reduction - and then acting like that'll solve the problem? You argue like a revolutionary just to advocate for the most moderate action. Or did I miss the part where the Democrats are committed to actually quitting, or at least substantially reigning in, capitalism? Or even stopping people from being trillionaires?
the investment returns on just $10 million would give you at least $250 thousand every year indefinitely (and adjusted upward a bit for inflation every year).
If you do that calculation with $1 trillion, that's $50 billion in spending money per year, or $137 million per day, $5.7m per hour, $95,000 per minute, $1,600 per second.
If you accumulated $1m per minute, or $60m per hour, guess how long it would take to reach $1 trillion? Well, $60m/hour is $1.44 billion per day, $10 billion per week, so it would be about 100 weeks or 2 full years before you hit $1 trillion. And that's assuming no investments, nothing but taking the money and throwing the cash into a vault.
$1m per minute, and it's still 2 years before you get $1 trillion.
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Athletes are among the people who earn the highest salaries based on their abilities and talents. The top athletes earn more than the top Hollywood stars. The English Premier League has the highest total wage bill of any futbol / soccer league on the planet. Paying Manchester City's wage bill costs £300m per year, the club with the lowest wage bill was Burnley at only £70m/year. Sum up every team and you get £2.7 billion per year, or $3.6 billion. That's less than 1% of $1 trillion. If you took $1 trillion in cash and set it aside, never adding anything to it, you could pay the wages of all those clubs for centuries.
If you were born in the year 1AD and made $1,000,000 every day without ever spending a penny, you would still be hundreds of billions short of a trillion.
I had to see the disparity myself on this.
1 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
365x2,025 = 739,125 days
739,125 x 1,000,000 = 739,125,000,000
Yes, the math works out that you'd only be ~73.9% of the way there at that rate.
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 trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYJ5ZViYhHQ
Although I think the guillotine may be too nice of a punishment for the billionaires or more....
No its fine bro! We can still have money bro! This is a reasonable way of organizing a society its labor and its physical resources, bro! Just one more grotesque abomination of decadence while the furnaces go cold the people are exhausted the soil is depleted and children die of hunger on the open street because we paid to tear down their tents and lock up the dumpsters, bro! Just one more bro! Just one more and then we can fix capitalism, bro! Fix it with market reforms and gentle nudges, bro! Nothing to harsh, bro!
It's enough to spend $1 every second for 31,709 years.
I mentioned in a previous comment that at today's prices with a billion dollars I could comfortably support my family for ten thousand years.
With a trillion dollars, I could have been comfortably supporting my family since mammoths began to exist, and still have 5.2 million years' worth of savings.
Imagine if we like, picked you to crowdfund you, just to see what you would do with the money.
lol I don’t expect humanity to use money in the next 500 yrs.
lol I don’t expect humanity ~~to use money~~ in the next 500 yrs.
Certainly not fiat.
Yes. We still need money, it just needs to be the cool money invented by oligarchs.
Maybe Gates? The trillionaire lacks the requisite technical ability.
I did the maths on this recently in anticipation of this horrible event.
If you were the first human ever born, about 300,000 years ago, and you saved $10,000 a day without ever spending a penny, you would only recently have crossed the 1,000,000,000,000 mark.
Also there really should be an emoji for the guillotine.
yeah but what if trillionares could be robbed by a linux terminal command. gotcha you consie.
Here's where it's really dangerous. The spending in the 2020 election cycle in the US was the highest in history. The $18 billion spent was more than twice as much as the $8.5 billion in 2016 and even more than the $14.8 billion from 2024.
If Elon Musk wanted to go dollar-for-dollar with every ad dollar spent in the US, on every congressional race, mayor's race, and, of course, every presidential candidate from the moment they're just considering running to the day of the election, he could do it without even noticing. Even if he converted all his shares to cash and put them in an ultra-safe savings account that only paid 5% per year, he'd be bringing in $50 billion per year. So, a $18 billion election campaign would be a small fraction of his yearly income (especially given that it only happens every 4 years). In fact, if he saved up for 4 years and had $200b to spend every time there was a presidential election, he could outspend everybody else by a ratio of 10:1 without difficulty.
Now, what do you think he's actually going to spend to make sure that there are never any laws passed that threaten his wealth? And, if he doesn't think he's going to get the results he wants with his political spending alone, what else might he do with tens of billions per year outside the political system?
Remember, this is just his "pocket money", this isn't even dipping into his wealth so much that it actually might go down year-to-year.
So... Are you saying that those children should have to live with only one million dollars a year? Poor kids.
Fucking NGMI's, we should have camps for such paupers!
"modern human civilization" is also a pretty big range. Electricity alone is a rounding error in terms of how long we've been around.
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