Chrissy's Share: What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?

Wow, thanks, Chrissy! This is really impressive and I agree that the visuals really bring it home. The graphs are also a very helpful comparison. I recently read a report that the notion of increasing wages has often been derided from a neoliberal standpoint because they say that it will suppress jobs. However, data shows that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay was about 31-to-1 in 1978. Today it's roughly 300-to-1. And there are many more CEOs, which means their jobs haven't been suppressed due to wage increase :)

AMAZING! I always knew a Billion Dollars was a lot of money but did not fathom how much until now. I am already dizzy imagining what a Trillion Dollars look like, a figure Elon Musk is expected to reach shortly. While this amount of money in the possession of a single individual is insane, I would say, it is also vulgar!

WOW! Seeing Chrissy’s post made something click for me. When you actually see a billion dollars laid out, it becomes clear how far we’ve drifted from any shared sense of enough.

It makes me think about equality in a more human way. Not left or right. Just the simple idea that extreme wealth comes from systems we all contribute to, which means there is a responsibility that comes with it.

Philanthropy is great, but it is optional. Taxation is how we collectively recognise that privilege and opportunity are created together. Not as punishment, but as a way of keeping the playing field open for everyone else.

I wonder what would change if those with unimaginable abundance saw their wealth as something to steward, not just accumulate?

Holy cow, Anne, those numbers are stark…from 31:1 to 300:1, an 867.74% increase in 50 years?! It’s bonkers to me in hindsight and yet I have a feeling that the year to year didn’t seem so bad until it compounded upon itself by which point the system was stronger and harder to stop.

Incidentally, started reading “Same As Ever” by Morgan Housel this week and found in fascinating how he explains the US fixation on the 1950s as the golden age of the middle class. Because apparently, when you do the math, the median family income was lower, house ownership lower, homes sizes smaller, food costs higher, etc.…so what gives? More income equality overall. Here’s how Housel puts it in the book: “Many (but not all) Americans could look around and find that not only were they living comfortable lives, they were living lives that was just about as comfortable as those around them whom they compared themselves too. It’s the one thing that distinguishes the 1950s from other eras.”

Oh my gosh, seriously? Elon Musk is close to being a trillionaire?!? As in, ONE person?? The trillion dollar club, the list of countries with economies of $1T has only 21 member countries out of ~195 countries in the world.

Great thought experiment. I can’t fathom what all that money does to one’s psychology, but whatever it is, it feels pathological to me. I gotta believe the intangibility of their actual money must also make it hard to evoke a visceral reaction. I think I remembering reading somewhere that massively wealthy people tend to lose empathy for the common man and only see people as a means to an end.

I’d be really curious to see the research you're referring to if you happen to have it handy!! My first instinct is that wealth probably cuts in multiple directions. On one hand, I can imagine how having access to extraordinary resources might create distance from the everyday experiences of most people. On the other, some of the world's biggest philanthropic efforts, scientific research, medical breakthroughs, cultural institutions, and large-scale projects have only been possible becaause individuals were willing to deploy vast amounts of capital.
I also find myself resisting the idea that money itself is inhérently corrupting or that wealth automatically makes someone a worse human being.I'd like to think (perhaps naively!!) it's more complicated than that. I've known some very wealthy people who were generous, thoughtful, and deeply grounded, and some people with very little money who weren't. Wealth may amplify certain traits, but I'm not convinced it creates them.
It's one of the reasons I'm not sure Elon Musk's wealth is the primary reason people dislike him. My sense is that people's reactions are often tied more to his behaviour, politics, communication style, or the influence he exercises than to the size of his bank account itself.
But that's very much a hypothesis rather than a conclusion, so I'd be interested in seeing any research or evidence that points in a different direction!

Yes working with billionaires on philanthropy, I can confirm that wealth amplifies things but doesn't necessarily mean that someone who is rich is morally worse than someone who has less wealth. However, I think what is really hard about Elon is that he "punches down". The richest and perhaps one of the most powerful individuals in the world takes time out of his day to bully others. That is what I find most disturbing. I don't take anything away from his professional accomplishments but I think at history will not be kind to the way he treated others.

PS: this applies to anyone who bullies :)

Love your counterweighting points, Jeanne. And you're right - there is probably very little if anything about our psychology that doesn't have multiple factors so applying wealth alone, however obvious and central to someone's identity, may not be a particularly reliable indicator of one's character. I do wonder, though, whether *scale* of wealth increases the likelihood of pathology. Or maybe it's the reverse and someone's existing pathology makes them more likely to be the kind of person who can accumulate massive amount of wealth?? (How crazy is it that we've reached a point in wealth accumulation that additional stratification of the rich might be helpful when discussing -- e.g., wealthy, super wealthy, and massively, absurdly, crazy wealthy?)

I like the word pathology in this context over corruption...to me, pathology suggests a more organic, passive breakdown in our brain's ability to make sense of something while corruption suggests a certain level of free will and awareness. In the case of someone like Musk, I also think it can be both!

Other crazy questions that came to me thinking about your reply (which I wouldn't have thought of otherwise score one for the mission of this site/community!) - in the context of uber wealthy, are the those that are genuinely generous an exception or equal reality; are all philanthropic endeavors actually philanthropic (e.g., we'll never know what part of the Rockefeller's mindset was a true belief in philanthropy vs. a way to avoid the calls for more taxes on the rich at the time); and to what degree will we ever really know the full accounting of these rich people without a personal relationship? I'm thinking of Bill Gates here, for example. I had implicitly put him in a different category thinking him more stable despite his wealth, more upright and full of integrity but then hear his name tied to Epstein and the have no idea what to think...or believe.