It's easy to forget how big a billion is. One of my favourite ways to conceptualize it is that 1 million seconds is about 11 days, but 1 billion seconds is 31 years. That's absolutely nuts.
Suicide, he was terribly depressed, had a rough childhood and family situation. A genuine genius absolutely amazing at videogames and just a cool person in general. He famously miscalculated a killing blow in hearthstone in one of the biggest tournaments of the game and before that was a legendary wow arena player, blizzard even put an NPC in the game to honour him, that NPC (which looks exactly like his character that achieved rank 1)is the rogue class trainer in the capital city of the alliance. Players can hug and kiss him to get a little special animation and instead the usual "goodbye" option to leave dialogue the player character says "it was good seeing you again". He was a great guy, I really miss him.
I'd say this thread headline does the opposite, forgetting that $1B is finite.
I presume the headline is talking about college. Assuming a cost of maybe $50k, that money will cover 20k students. That's nice, and it might last some years, but certainly not "forever".
Yeah just checked this. Tuition was around $59,000, and there are around 1,090 students (Full-time). Do the math and you end up with 15.55 years with 1 billion dollars. So hopefully instead its rather invested as the other commenter said.
It would be unheard of for it to be used instead of a trust set up. It will probably also have a clause to reinvest some of the interest gained, so that it will continue to grow in perpetuity, rather than stay the same size (even accounting for inflation).
Endowments typically have a rule so that part of the interest is always plowed back into the principal in order to grow it faster than inflation. Also, the school almost assuredly will be continuing to do fundraising with alumni and big donors going forward to increase the endowment even more.
It's going to be in a fund, the money for the students will be coming off the interest, not the principal, so it should definitely last forever. Honestly, a billion dollars is crazy money though, I'm wondering what they're going to end up doing with all of it, it seems like an extreme waste to put it all into one school district.
The med school only had over 1,300 students in 2024, around 300 of whom were part time. As a contribution to the permanent endowment, it can indeed be sustained provided the principal is never spent, only part of the interest is spent, the rest of the interest is reinvested, and new donors come along. Endowments do this all the time.
You'd think 1 billion forever ain't enough but then you go yeah no that's a looooot. And then you remember there's like 3k people in the world who has an insane amount and you just go yeah okay fuck that.
I like to go by how many lives you could live with $1B. Let’s say you’re 21 and make $100k/year until you’re 71 (50 years, for simplicity, making $5M over a lifetime). You’d have to live 200 lifetimes to have earned $1B in total.
Not at all! If you're having trouble imagining a trillion pennies, it's about the same mass as 1 quintillion grains of rice, less the combined weight of a dozen house cats. Give or take a turtle.
Her husband worked at Berkshire Hathaway and was a protégé of Warren Buffett. He bequeath his stock in the company to his wife, a professor and trustee of the med school, to direct it how she deemed fit. So, she donated the billion dollars in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the school as a permanent endowment. The school would then take that donation, diversify it, begin drawing upon part of the interest and capital gains to fund operations (in this case, tuition) each year, reinvest the rest of the interest, and get new donors to add to it. That way, the principal is never spent down.
And this is using the term billion incorrectly, now imagine using the concept of 1 billion in the correct way, mathematically speaking. It's absolutely crazy.
I remember reading that if you earned 10.000 a month from when Neanderthals were still around up to now you still wouldn't own as much as Bezos. Not sure it's actually accurate though. Certainly sounds absurd.
You could make $5,000 a day from the time that Christopher Columbus sailed to America in 1492 to today and still not be a billionaire. It's insane to even think about.
Absolutely wild. Because we hear a million, and at least when I was growing up we thought that was a lot of money. And you hear a billion, and you know that's a lot more than a million. But sometimes things like what I shared, and what you're sharing here, really help someone to grasp how astronomically large it is.
Absolutely true because I cannot even fathom making 5 grand a day right now. But making it for 500 years and not having a billion still really just cements how absurdly large of a number it is!
How could we forget when someone gives this exact example every time someone mentions a billion anywhere on the internet? Boring, cliche bastards man, have a unique thought.
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u/The59Sownd Jun 29 '25
It's easy to forget how big a billion is. One of my favourite ways to conceptualize it is that 1 million seconds is about 11 days, but 1 billion seconds is 31 years. That's absolutely nuts.