As of December 10, 2020, according to NPR, there were five people on Earth whose personal wealth exceeded $100 billion. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos topped the list with a personal net worth of $182 billion, followed by Elon Musk at $147 billion, Bill Gates with $129 billion, French businessman Bernard Arnault with $110 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with only $105 billion. Together their fortunes total more than $673,000,000,000.
Exactly how much is $100,000,000,000?
Americans—even well-educated Americans who consider themselves literate in other areas—are notoriously innumerate, so let’s put these numbers in some perspective.
How long does it take to earn $100,000,000,000?
If you found a very lucrative job that paid $500 an hour and you worked 50 hours per week, you would make about $1,250,000 per year. At that salary, it would take you 80,000 years to earn a hundred billion dollars.
If you made $100,000 a year—about $40 per hour assuming you worked 50 hours per week—you would have to work for a million years to make a hundred billion dollars.
If you made a more modest $15 per hour—the federal minimum wage proposed by a number of liberal politicians—and worked 50 hours per week, you would make about $37,500 per year. That means you would have to work for about 2.6 million years to earn a hundred billion dollars, and it would take you over 26,000 years just to get to one billion dollars.
In fact, if you had managed to earn $10,000 a day for the last 500 years, you would only have about $1.8 billion. And of course, that’s only the money you’ve earned; it doesn’t factor in the money you would have to spend to survive, so it doesn’t actually represent your net wealth accumulation.
If it’s impossible for a human to earn $100 billion through their labor, how, then, have these men amassed these fortunes?
Their wealth doesn’t come primarily from their salaries; the highest paid people in the world—mainly corporate CEOs and professional athletes—make salaries in the hundreds of millions per year, but even these salaries would take several lifetimes to add up to $100 billion. Instead, their main source of income is investments, such as stock ownership. Bezos made about $90 billion in 2020 during the pandemic due to Amazon sales increasing by 40% over the previous year and Amazon stock prices increasing by 70% from March to December. Tesla stock prices increased eight-fold from January 2020 to January 2021, and Musk’s net worth quadrupled over that period.
Stock prices, of course, increase as a result of labor done by people who make far less than the CEOs in the top salary tiers. Tesla stock prices rise because engineers design Tesla vehicles; factory workers assemble them; marketers advertise them; custodians and electricians keep factories running; IT technicians keep everyone connected. Musk himself has almost nothing to do with the process of building a car, testing it for safety, advertising it to the public, or selling it to a customer.
It’s difficult to obtain exact salary numbers for low-level workers because companies typically discourage or even ban employees from discussing pay rates, but a June 2020 proposal by Tesla to build a manufacturing plant in Travis County, Texas estimated that it would create 5,000 jobs using “approximately 65% unskilled labor” at a “[l]iving wage of $15/hour” for “construction and permanent labor force.” It also claimed an “[a]verage annual salary [of] $47,147,” which, of course, is inflated by six- and seven-figure salaries for administrators and bosses in those top salary tiers.
Even assuming the figure of $47,147 accurately represented the salaries of a majority of those 5,000 employees, those salaries combine for an annual cost of less than $236,000,000. Those 5,000 employees would have to work over 400 years, collectively, to earn $100 billion.
The centibillionaires also pay a lower tax rate than most of their own employees. Long-term capital gains—profits from the sale of an asset like stock that you’ve owned for more than a year—are taxed at a maximum rate of 20% for single filers, whereas anyone making over about $40,000 per year is paying at least a 22% federal income tax rate. In other words, the money you earn with your own labor is taxed at a higher rate than profits that result from someone else’s labor.
It’s certainly valid to argue that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other founders of huge, highly successful businesses such as Tesla, Amazon, and Facebook deserve to be well-compensated for their work, that they deserve to profit from their ingenuity and investment. My purpose here is not to dispute that point. But money is by definition a finite resource; otherwise, it would be valueless. It is also a finite resource that is necessary for survival in the modern world, and our current economic system has enabled a small number of people to hoard a massive amount of that resource. What could we do with that amount of wealth if it were not concentrated in so few hands? What can a hundred billion dollars actually buy?
Housing, for one thing. HUD reports that in their 2019 single night count, 567,715 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness. These include families with children, but even assuming each was a single individual, what would it cost to house them all?
To build a modest $100,000 home for 567,715 people would cost about $57 billion—less than a third of Bezos’s personal net worth. In fact, he could build all of these homes and would still be a centibillionaire and the fourth richest person alive when he was done.
A hundred billion dollars can also buy a lot of food. The International Food Policy Research Institute calculates that to end world hunger and poverty by 2030—not just feed the hungry but eliminate poverty—would cost about $265 billion per year. That adds up to about $3.3 trillion over the next nine years. The wealthiest 1% of Americans collectively own over $36 trillion. We could end hunger and poverty for the entire planet with just 10% of their total wealth.
Money also pays debts, and Americans have about $45 billion in medical debt in collections right now. Bezos could pay it all, and build all those homes, and still have $80 billion left.
Musk could give a $10,000 bonus to every one of Tesla’s 48,000 full-time employees and barely notice a dip in his bank account; it would amount to less than one third of one percent of his net worth, and yet it would be life-changing to the thousands of employees making $15 per hour. A $100,000 bonus would cost him just over 3% of his net worth.
What if the ultra-wealthy wanted to spend these mega-fortunes on themselves? Is it possible to spend $100,000,000,000 in a lifetime?
Imagine the most extravagant lifestyle you can, filled with multi-million-dollar homes, private jets, exotic vacations, and the indulgence of every whim you could conceive, a lifestyle that costs $1 million per day. If you spent $1 million every day of your life and lived to the age of ninety, you would have spent about $33 billion—less than 20% of Bezos’s fortune.
Of course these numbers are an oversimplification. These men don’t actually have $100 billion sitting in a bank account somewhere; the numbers represent their net worth, which includes their property, stock, and other investments. If they suddenly sold all their shares in their own companies’ stocks to buy houses for the houseless and food for the hungry, the effect on the markets and the economy would be incalculable.
The point is that perhaps we should not allow a single individual to attain that much wealth in the first place. I once heard someone compare it to a dragon sitting on his pile of gold. He can’t possibly use it all himself; he hoards it only because he can, because it pleases him, and damn the villagers who need it to live. But because money is a finite resource, the more I have, the less you have, and when five men hoard more of this resource than everyone else put together—not just more than they could spend in a lifetime, but more than they could spend in hundreds of lifetimes—there is far less of that resource in circulation for everyone else to use.
Some will argue that these men already donate millions of dollars of their own wealth to charitable causes—such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which combats poverty and disease all over the world—and invest their wealth in important scientific ventures, such as Musk’s SpaceX. In fact, CNBC reports that in 2018, Jeff Bezos donated about $2 billion to charity, and from 1994 to 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates donated $45.5 billion. Zuckerberg has also donated several billion dollars over the last few years. And yet still—still—these men have fortunes over a hundred billion dollars.
Bezos’s $2 billion donation is just over 1% of his net worth at the end of 2020. For an individual with a net worth of $250,000, it is equivalent to donating about $2,750. For an average American in the bottom 50% of personal wealth ownership, whose net worth is about $14,300, it’s equivalent to donating about $157. More significantly, if that individual donates $157, they will have $14,143 left. When Bezos donates $2 billion, he has $180 billion left and is still the richest man alive by a wide margin. In reality, these charitable donations—which sound massively generous to average people—are simply good P.R. for the mega-wealthy, enabling them to appear beneficent while simultaneously having almost no effect at all on their personal fortunes other than to serve as convenient tax deductions.
There is no good reason to allow these few individuals to hoard this enormous wealth when its redistribution could do so much good. The argument that they earned this money and therefore deserve to keep it is nonsense. It is simply not possible to earn a hundred billion dollars through one’s labor. Rather, these men benefit from being at the top of a system that generates massive profits through the labor of many thousands of people and then filters those profits upward, like an hourglass in reverse, so that those at the bottom are forced to fight over the sparsest remains while those at the top hunch like dragons over their piles of gold.
What is the solution?
The idea of socialism is becoming more palatable particularly among young Americans for exactly this reason, but there is also a lot of daylight between socialism (whatever you think that means) and completely unfettered capitalism. And in that daylight there is room for many small measures, such as higher taxes on capital gains, wealth taxes, and wealth caps. Some argue that these measures would stifle innovation, would discourage these overlords from continuing to grow their empires and “create jobs,” but the evidence indicates that many other factors have a bigger impact on innovation and economic growth than taxes do. When hundreds of thousands of Americans are hungry and sleeping on streets, unable to pay for healthcare, and suffering under crushing burdens of debt, how can we continue to justify the status quo?
