Thursday, March 12, 2015

Money Isn't Everything. It's BILLIONS of Things, All Stacked Up in a Vault.

I thought this was interesting.

Last week Forbes released its annual list of the world's billionaires.

Google claims that is a picture of a billion dollars.
OK. It's not like I'm going to count that shit.
There are 1,826 billionaires on Planet Earth. Which is a new record. Go, super-wealthy people! Be fruitful and multiply. Adopt me if you must.

The 1,826 individuals have an aggregated net worth that exceeds that GDP of most of the sovereign nations of the world. Which just goes to prove that capitalism > civilization. I guess.

This guy totally chose correctly.
The United States of America leads all other nations in the number of billionaires, with approximately 318.9 million. Just kidding! That's the total U.S. population. Of course not everyone in America is a billionaire. It just looks that way because we're all so clean.

This man here just barely breaks the $1 million threshold
required for citizenship.
The actual number of American billionaires is 536. The oldest person on that list is David Rockefeller, whose money has been passed down through his family since approximately when Jesus
changed his last name from Rockefeller to Christ.

The youngest person on the list is the guy who invented Snapchat. He's 24 years old and is worth $1.5 billion.

I'll pause here until you're done slamming your face
against the nearest wall.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is - for the 16th goddamned time - the richest man in the world. Think about the last time you hit the Enter key and got the Blue Screen of Death, then read the previous sentence again.

I've lost jobs over less than this, and my net worth is something like
200 bucks and a bag of Cheetos.
Bill Gates is worth $79.2 billion. Bill Gates could give a $10 bill to every single man, woman, and child on the planet...and still be a billionaire several times over.

If I gave ten bucks to each of my co-workers, I wouldn't be able to go grocery shopping until next payday. Just sayin'.

I do want to give a special shout-out to Guatemala, which this year gained its first-ever billionaire. ¡órale!

I also want to point out that seven of the 10 richest people in the world are American. And of those, two are members of the Walmart dynasty and two are the Koch brothers.

Meanwhile, every person who reads this blog could live comfortably for the rest of their lives on what Mark Zuckerberg (#16 on the billionaires list) has made from unleashing Facebook on the world.

I'm pretty sure his monthly hoodie budget
exceeds my mortgage payment.
But no worries. Honestly, my Drunkards are worth more to me than a vast fortune, so long as some of you let me crash on your sofa if I ever find myself destitute.

P.S. You know how "the 1%" became a thing in the last Presidential election? Well, the number of billionaires in the U.S. actually translates to something like "the 17/10,000s of a percent." So the right wing really hates a lot more of us than they let on.


  1. You are welcome to couch surf at our place anytime, destitute or not. We just may ask for a favor or two. We're fat- we like people who can cook well :)

  2. Is that a real billion to which you refer, or is it what you Americans call a "billion" in your language - i.e. one thousand million, in English?


    1. It's one thousand million to non-American speakers of English (the same way it's aluminium and not aluminum), unless it's Carl Sagan speaking, because when he said "billions" he really meant numbers that were pretty damned big.

      It's still a huge amount of money, though. Some of these people make more per second than the lowest worker on their payroll makes in a year.

