Whoops! – I just lost One Billion Dollars
It used to be that a Billion was an incredibly big number. A number that was just so big our poor human minds couldn’t comprehend how big it was.
These days we hear about Billions every day. Over recent months we have heard that lots of the Banks have announced losses from their bad investment decision to invest in bundles of sub-prime mortgage paper. Losses of $1 billion are common, $3 Billion quite frequent and even $18 Billion in the case of Citigroup. So maybe a Billion isn’t so much any more.
I decided to try to get my head around what a Billion really is. The number 1 billion has two meanings. The US Billion is 1,000,000,000 or One Thousand Millions. The rest of the world used to refer to a Billion mostly as 1,000,000,000,000 or One Million Millions. These days we mostly seem to mean US Billions when billions are mentioned but if you are checking your salary then you should make sure you are using the right term for Billions.. 
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So what salary would you need to earn a Billion dollars in your working lifetime?
Let us assume you will work for 40 years since if you earn that much I doubt you will want to work till you die.
These are very rough figures. I see no need to be too precise to make the point of just how much a Billion really is.
$1,000,000,000 / 40 = $25 Million per year
$25,000,000 / 52 = $480,769 per week
$480,769 per / 40 = $12,019 per hour
$12,019 per hour / 60 = $200 per minute
$200 per minute / 60 = $3.33 per second
So you need to make $3.33 for every second of your working life to make $1 Billion.
Let’s imagine it another way.
I grain of sugar is roughly a 1 millimetre cube.
So one billion grains of sugar would fill a box the was a cubic metre.
A cubic metre is 1 metre wide, by 1 metre deep and 1 metre high.
or roughtly 39 inches by 39 inches by 39 inches
Imagine a box that size filled with sugar. Handful upon handfuls of grains of sugar and that is about 1 billion.
So one billion is still a very big number and a number so big that it is still difficult to comprehend even with examples such as these.
Next time you hear about a bank that has foolishly lost $1 Billion, $2 billion or more, just imagine all those grains of sugar were dollar bills and try to imagine how you would sleep at night kowing you had lost all those truckloads of money.
Of course it wouldn’t be YOUR money. It would be the money people had put away for their life savings, for their pensions and for their dreams for the future, so if you worked for a bank and had lost all that money it wouldn’t be your problem.
You would still have all the millions you had been paid in bonuses for all those brilliant investment decisions you made – like investing in sub prime mortgages.
There is a moral to this tale. I just can’t quite put it into words suitable for a family audience right now.
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