Do you make $5,000/day?

In a video game, whatever allowed them to become billionaires would have been called an "exploit" and would have been nerfed in the next patch.

Our universe is abandon ware?
- Lemmy discovers deism. ;)
- Worse, our society is
This is actually true. I'm a billionaire in No Man's Sky, I got there by core drilling an S-class hazardous planet (constant lightning storms, tornadoes, persistent ice/blizzard and anomalous gravity that sends you flying and damages structures), and I was digging out Activated Indium at a rate of around €9,000,000 credits/real hour, even when the game was turned off , or around €216 million credits per real life day.

The game developers took multiple visits to my planet -- saw that I wasn't cheating or exploiting in any way, didn't know what to do, so they simply nerfed the price that Activated Indium sold for on the open market. It went from 9000-12000 cr/unit to something like 33 -- a little less than the most abundant element in the universe, iron dust.

I had managed to sell approximately €1.4 billion worth of Indium before the nerf/economic changes, and that amount of money in NMS is ridiculous (A fully upgraded S-Class Freighter might be €500 million credits, think Super Star Destroyer along with accompanying navy). It has basically made everything completely free.

I cannot fathom real people, in real life, running around with multiple hundreds of billions of credits or dollars. It's not even "money" at that point, it's just real life cheats. You can buy entire nation states with it. It's ridiculous and gross and shouldn't be allowed.
- Another great example of how insane that level of wealth is this project https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
- This was amazing. Thank you. Sent this to a friend who is a gazillionaire in FF14.
  
  The game developers took multiple visits to my planet
  
  Can you share more about this part? I never played NMS, so how does that work? How did you know they were visiting? What did they do when they were there? Kinda cool you were noticed for your efficiency!
In '00s games, sure.

In '20s games, it would be part of the Pay2Win scheme and only available to players who have rich parents.

This is a few years old but still a good visualisation:

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Start scrolling.

Wow. This is another level of doomscrolling. Very educational though
- Does anything happen after "we cannot accept this level of inequality any longer" ? I stopped at 500 billion.
And do not miss https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md

Love this guy’s work
- I love that this guy decided that GitHub is the place to share his socio-economic essay. Next to a guy who used it for his sourdough guides my favourite use of GitHub yet.
Very persuasive to people ignorant enough to think wealth grows linearly, yes.

If every dollar I made went under a mattress instead of saved/invested, my net worth also would be a small fraction of what it actually is today.
- So what do you think, when will you reach one billion with this great investment scheme?
  
  ETA: Snark aside. That's kinda the point, isn't it? Nobody can work so much that this kind of money is deserved by their work. You need to have money to get more money. And if you have enough, it just keeps getting more.

kinda makes you think. billionaires should not exist.

Virtually everyone fails to grasp exactly how large of a number a billion is. It’s so, so much bigger than the ”very big number” people think of when they hear the word.
- The difference between one million and one billion is roughly one billion.
- A million seconds is a little over 11 days.
  
  A billion seconds is a little over 31 years.
  
  Billionaires should be required to count out their dollars individually every few days.
- I wonder if world class mathematicians have a much better grasp of it — and yet fail to use their expertise to point out the absurdity of the current wealth inequality
  
  Or do even they, world class mathematicians, not really ‘grasp’ it in this wildly important and urgent sense.
- More people fail to grasp that net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of actual money.
100% and, more so, thats not just a billion in cash, of course. Thats a billion dollars worth of stuff that makes you money, that can be sold off for at least a billion, most likely far more.

When people read these valuations, they often think to themselves "surely they can't be worth that much" and they're right. It will always be much, much more. Other than Trump, wealth valuations are always very, very conservative, due to the nature of how they do it, and thats before we get to the fact that they're only estimating their wealth on the assets that are publicly disclosed.
Why's that?

I mean its worse than that. Youd need to work at a rate of 16,600/hr, 24 hours a day for 2,000 years to get even close to Elon Musk

But if you got $5000 at 0.7% yearly interest rate for 2000 years, you'd get to Musk's wealth. You can only get that high with compound interest with investments, rather than earning money.

But if you made just 3% interest on your money as you deposit $1,825,000 annually, over 532 years, you'd end up having $410 trillion dollars or more than 2,000 bezos.

Interest is insane when you think about it
- That's why it's smart to park money in high-interest assets (like index funds). Of course, you need to be in a position to save money.
- you just need to have unlimited time, at 3% annual interest, it takes 77.89 years to 10x your money. it just happens that 532 years is 6.8 times 77.89 years, therefore you would just put a 1 million multiplier on your money anyways. And putting 1 million multiplier on 1 million dollars is enough to become a trillionaire anyways
  
  At 3% interest, you double your money every 23.4 years, how many 23.4 years do you have?
- thats why investments are inportant for long term. the problem we face as a society is that the majority of people cant afford to make these investments, as they are living day to day with their paychecks.
- Yeah, I had to go down to 3% for it to even make sense.
- Wait til you hear about inflation.
2000 Bezos or about 4x the GDP of the planet.

People just need to invest and stop blaming others for being broke SMH.

Invest one penny at 3% per year, who can't afford one penny? You'll have $68 billion in just one thousand years. Poverty is a choice.
- This shit right here is why ancient Vampire Investment Bankers are so insufferable.
yeah but 1.8 mil 532 years ago would have been valued like billions today. so you still need to be a billionaire to become that rich
- Not really with that amount of time. Suppose you put away $1,000 a year for 532 years, at 3% you still end up with $225 billion.
  
  The deposits are completely dwarfed by the compounding interest. If you only start with $1,000 and add nothing else but let that original $1,000 compound at 4% you'll have over $1 trillion.
That's why these posts are stupid to me.
- Same. There's no gold standard, money is a social construct.
  
  I wonder if the people who think like this, also assume "if bezos had less money, I'd have more".

For the curious you'd make 970million in the 532years. Jeff bozos net worth is about 200 billion. You'd need an annual interest rate of about 2.12% to reach 200billion over that period, assuming you spend none of it, if you took an annual income of 20k then you'd only be at 135billion at the end of the period.

so i couldn't even spend any of it ?

that's rubbish billionaire. unless i could use it to leverage banks to give me loans off of national credit programs.

and still then i'd just prefer not to.

i feel badly for people who can't get ever seem to get enough.

I bet for a long while you'd be like, "What even are dollars?", since they hadn't been invented yet.

Nevermind dollars. What about inflation? $5000/day in 1900 would be worth $187,000 today. That's $68M/year.

You'd need, what? 15 years to get a billion at that rate. You'd also be accusing money faster than Rockefeller.

I have to wonder where all that wealth would even be coming from.
- Presumably the same place real rich people get it today. Gradually inflating the currency so that even if they're not directly stealing from you the increase in their wealth comes from the lessening of value of your, mine, and everyone elses money.
- You'd also be accusing money faster than Rockefeller.
  
  It was the 20 dollar bill that killed the butler, with a candelabra in the hall!
- I think you have to deflate to the year to make it equal to $5k today. For instance, if we go back to 1635, we're looking at $131.62/day

That why you should have invested that 969 million usd in bitcoin

/s

Okay but in fairness if you put like 1% of that money virtually anywhere but under your matress you'd probably be richer than Bezos now. Even at like 3% interest of a $18,250 compunded over 530 years you'd have about half of Bezos' net worth.

Talking about billionaires ... it almost seems quaint as we barrel towards having actual trillionaires.

What a failure of society
I have a hard enough time getting my head around how much money $100B is already. Like, I don't even see numbers above the hundreds of thousands ever (usually on loans, like my mortgage), so the idea that some of these people could buy my house 100,000+ times over, and I will spend years, paying for it once, is hard enough.

Wealth hoarding has gotten way out of hand.

Big brain chuds: But what if you used that money to exploit the labor of others?

Although if you did earn $5k per day and managed to invest at a yearly return of 3% above inflation, you'd have about $41 trillion

At 1% above interest you'd just have $3.6 billion so invest wisely

(edit, corrected the numbers)

Okay so then how is he worth that much?

These memes and stories are like, "its unbelievable that Bezos is worth so much money", no it makes perfect sense!

Okay so then how is he worth that much?

Easy: He birthed himself into a rich family. Classical self made billionaire
- But his parents weren't super rich billionaires, were they? No one had a hundred billion dollars before, he didnt get it all from his parents, where did he get it all?
- His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That's within the ability of many middle class workers
  
  His parents were employees, not business owners.
- Plenty of people in that situation who aren't Bezos rich, no?
  
  Makes me think that explanation isn't sufficient.
Recipe for a billionaire includes:

(optional) being born wealthy

Exploitation of others

luck

Billionaires like to think they worked hard but in reality they exploited others and were lucky in some form or another. Exploitation comes from paying workers as little as possible and/or having such terrible work conditions to maximize efficiency to the point that who cares if someone dies working. Fighting unions and keeping costs down (including pay) means more profit. It also means you can charge less to force other competitors out of business unless they can do the same amount of exploiting to keep costs down.

Beyond that, there's just general business and economic concepts like operating at scale which luck or generational wealth can help shortcut there.
- Being born wealthy isn't really optional. It's actually necessary and a big reason why this system is so absolutely terrible, because the American dream is a capitalist myth to manipulate the masses.
  
  The exceptions are not always exceptions, like the apartheid boy Elon and the 1 in a million that actually is an exception is drilled into our brains by the media like how gambling companies make ads about the people that win the lottery.
Having listened to 'good bad billionaire' for several episodes the formula is

Create or inherit a company

Do good at it

Float it on the stock exchange

Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

Make an insanely popular game

Sell it to Microsoft

Or

Be the child of someone who did one of the above
Okay so then how is he worth that much?

Because wealth does not grow linearly, and OP is a dumb false analogy.

spoken like a true green manalishi

Linear growth < exponential growth

So... Basic math...?

I don't think this was meant for, obviously, really smart people like you. It is to give a sense of scale that a working person understands. The concept of a billion dollars isn't easy for most people to actually comprehend.
The main difference is that you work at a linear rate, but can exploit others at an exponential rate.

Did they have computers and future technology back then?

Rockefeller didn't have them either

Huh. Based on this online calculator(https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator), if i earn £5000 everyday in 1493(Cuntopher Columbus start his slave trading voyage in 1492 i think), i would have £1,825,000, which in today money is roughly £1,813,589,780.47, that's just for a single year.

Kinda made me the richest immortal in the world.

that is obviously just an analogy for the huge time span. $5000/day meaning at the current value
- Yes, under those conditions you'd have about $969 million: 531 years since 1493. $5000 x 365 = $1825000 per year x 531 = $969,075,000
  
  According to this article Jeff Bezos makes $595,728,000 a week (holy shit), so even if you were Methuselah earning $5000 a day, he'd still have more money than you after two weeks 😱
- A dumb false analogy because it's completely linear.
If you're going to adjust the final amount for inflation then you need to adjust the £5000 for inflation so in 1493 you would only be earning £6 per day.
I don't think the original poster meant you to 'adjust for inflation'. Good thinking tho!
Was Columbus trading slaves?
- He enslaved people as he travelled
  
  https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/us/christopher-columbus-slavery-disease-trnd/index.html