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by CobrastanJorji 1599 days ago
Perspective is weird with large amounts of money. I think human brains are just not good at big numbers. You need something to compare it to, and the big numbers of other companies still leave it completely abstract.

Perhaps it might work better with a comparison to a person, like "Alphabet made so much revenue this quarter that, assuming they had no expenses, after a full year, Alphabet would have roughly as much money as Elon Musk." But maybe not, because now you've just moved the problem to understanding how rich Elon Musk is.

2 comments

One perspective:

Roughly 10c of revenue for every person on the planet every day.

Maybe "Alphabet's revenue this quarter was about 3% of San Francisco's real estate."
Maybe "Alphabet's revenue this quarter was a million times my annual salary"

- did not calculate, just saying :)

Not 10c, it's $10 :)
$10 for the quarter I think!
You missed the "per day" part.
It's much harder to understand how rich Elon Musk is, because if he tried to sell even a small percentage of his Tesla shares, the value would evaporate. The revenue figures of these companies are more understandable because that is cold hard cash coming in the door
He actually sold a boatload of TSLA last year [1]. But yes, his wealth is not really expressible in USD.

If you tried to acquire a similar stake in TSLA, the price would shoot up and it would cost you more. If he tried to sell all his shares, it would plummet and he’d get less out.

1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-tesla-share-selling-...

Just recently I saw a headline about former Bezos wife selling $8B of Amazon stock. Does not seem to have affected the price all that much. She is probably going to have to pay $2B in taxes for that transaction.
Probably not since she donates all of it.