I think the scale, it makes it hard for people to grasp $1 billion. For instance if anyone has that much wealth, in effect there ceases to be any way for anything, a n y t h i n g, reasonable to have an effective cost.
If you have $1 billion to “invest,” even if you made the worst possible use of that capital, if you put it into a 1% savings account, then your lowest possible annual return on investment, uncompounded, would be 1% of $1 billion, or $10,000,000… per year, in perpetuity.
Without ever touching the principal, your “income” would be multi-millions.
But that is not what happens. If you have that much capital, you invest it in a diverse portfolio to maximize return on investment. Such a portfolio might well be expected to return something like 10%. Which would be $100,000,000 to pish away, every year.
For such wealth, nothing that anyone could ever need or reasonably want has any cost. In a very real practical sense, for the extremely rich, everything, e v e r y t h i n g, is free.
And there is no “earning” in that scenario. Once you have that kind of capital, you never have to do a stitch of work to “earn” your hundred thousand tonnes of flesh. It is all… free.
Now consider that some people have schemed their way to fortunes of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is so wrong.
