No one works for a billion dollars

Jeremiah Red tweeted:

If you worked every single day, making $5000/day, from the time Columbus sailed to America, to the time you are reading this tweet, you would still not be a billionaire, and you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week. No one works for a billion dollars.

Corey DenOfHorrors responded:

So I was inspired by this tweet, and I wanted to see exactly how far back in history you would have to go to reach Jeff Bezos' Worth (for this tweet, about $108 billion dollars).

Corey suggested figuring $5000/day from the beginning of human history, or from about 10,000 BC.

So, extending this to the beginning of mankind. $5000 a day, every day, for 12019 years. If you do that, you reach $21 BILLION DOLLARS. About ONE FIFTH of Jeff Bezos' worth.

Alas, Corey’s analysis gets swamped by a quibble over when human history started.

So I took another route through the numbers. Let’s round Bezos’ net worth to $100 billion. Since the time of Jesus, 2000 years ago, one would have to earn $137,000 a day to match his wealth.

I checked that Amazon has been in business 25 years. So that means in that time Bezos has earned $11 million a day or $76 million a week. Bezos probably didn’t earn that much at the beginning, so I consulted Google. It quotes Business Insider to say Bezos makes more that $1.5 billion a week. Let’s look at what one could do with $1.5 billion a week. From my computations:

I don’t know the size of the Amazon workforce. I’ve heard that at Walmart the number of workers is 1 million. So I’ll use that. Bezos could give all million workers a raise of $1500 a week or $75,000 a year.

Bezos could buy modest homes ($200K) for 7,500 homeless families each week, or for 375,000 families a year, essentially ending homelessness.

I’ve heard health insurance for a family can run $25,000 a year. So Bezos could buy health insurance for 60,000 people each week or 3 million people a year.

He could make substantial contributions to addiction programs, or conversions to wind or solar energy (such as cover the roof of each warehouse with solar panels), or to universal pre-kindergarten, or a host of other social justice issues.

I could quibble with details in the tweets I quoted above. Someone could do the same with the numbers I laid out. Even if the details are off this shows the magnitude of the difference Bezos could make in peoples lives. And isn’t.

The top quote makes an important point: No one works for a billion dollars. To get that rich one needs workers to exploit.



Philip Cohen is a sociologist who studies inequality. He created a chart based on census data showing inequality in America since 1947. Within those 70 years inequality is currently at its highest level.



David Leonhardt wrote an opinion column for the New York Times to discuss the taxes the rich are paying – or rather, not paying.

A decade ago Warren Buffet said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary. At the time fact-checkers said that wasn’t the norm.

It is now.

The top 400 families (somewhere around the top 0.0001%) paid overall 23% of their income in taxes. That is lower than any other income group.

Leonhardt discusses the forthcoming book The Triumph of Injustice by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. First, Leonhardt discusses the taxation in the American colonies. The North enacted a wealth tax. The South was hostile to taxation, worried that it “could undermine slavery by eroding the wealth of shareholders.” That inability to raise taxes contributed to their defeat in the Civil war.

Taxes on the rich prevailed in the first half of the 20th century. But since then all sorts of taxes on the wealthy have been repeatedly cut. The justification was the economy would benefit. As many studies have shown over the years, “The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades.”

The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.

Ah, that reinforces my understanding that a big part of what the rich are doing is keeping money out of the hands of the poor. The rich don’t want an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans. It’s a supremacist thing.

Leonhardt concludes:

I already know what some critics will say about these arguments — that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always manage to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.

Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?