[tombert]

It's weird right?

A billion dollars is a lot of money. It's an amount of money that I honestly cannot fully visualize. It's about three orders of magnitude more than the largest amount of money that I can easily visualize. If someone gifted me a billion dollars, that would be a lot more than enough to retire, extremely comfortably, pretty much anywhere on the planet.

But it doesn't seem like the $200+ billion that these CEOs have is ever enough. All they ever want is "another billion".

I remember my dad told me a story, when he was 18 (I think), he bet on a horse race and won $5. Instead of being happy with the $5 win, all he thought after that was that now he wanted another $5, and that if he had bet twice as much his profits would have been doubled. The objectively-good thing of winning $5 didn't make him happy because all he could think about was the fact that he should have more (and this realization is why he never really gambled after that).

[ThrowawayR2]

We are on Hacker News and so a billion dollars ought to be rather easy to visualize for VCs and hackers: it's the compensation of the equivalent of ~350 L4 developers from Google for ten years. What could one do with ~3500 man-years of developer time at their disposal? Rather a lot and that's the point. Immense quantities of money are not about personal consumption but about the ability to do things and more money means more and bigger things can be done.

[tombert]

I guess I meant in a "personal finance" sense.

I can visualize a few million dollars as about an order of magnitude more than I'm worth now. If someone gifted me a million dollars, I have a reasonably good idea of how I'd spend it. I'd pay off the house, pay off the credit cards, maybe move somewhere that isn't the cesspool of NYC, and invest the rest into a low-risk index fund. Boring, easy-to-digest stuff.

If someone gave me a billion dollars, I have absolutely no idea how the hell I'd spend it. It wouldn't be radically different than someone giving me a trillion dollars, at least not at first; they're basically infinite quantities of money to me. It seems almost trite to just dump it all into a Vanguard account.