How Long Would It Take You To Earn $1,000,000,000?

You'll probably be working for longer than civilization has existed.
By Chris Kolmar

Donald Trump is a billionare. With a B. $1,000,000,000. Nine zeros.[1]

That's such an obscene amount of money that you can't actually comprehend it. You might think you can, but trust me, you can't.

It's so much money that if you put it in a savings account at 1% interest you'd make $10,000,000/year. That single year interest payment at 1% is more than I'm probably going to make in my lifetime.

Heck, Hillary & Bill Clinton made a combined $28,300,000 in 2014 and it would take them almost 40 years at that rate to accumulate $1 billion.

All of that got us thinking, how long would it take you, dear reader, to reach $1 billion?

Well, if you make the US federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr (Roughly $14,500/year), you're looking at about 69,000 years. That's about 1/4 of the time humans have existed on earth.

Things are a bit better if you earn the US median household income of $52,000 -- that'll only set you back 19,231 years.[2]

So to help you try to understand how much money $1 billion, we put together this fun visualization below. You can, literally, see how long it would take you to join Zuck, Trump, Warren, and Bill in the billionare club by scrolling through the years.

For the best effect on dekstop, use the mousewheel or hold the down arrow. On mobile, have fun swiping down and I hope you finger doesn't get too tired in the process.

Oh and I tried having the computer generate 1,000,000,000 boxes and it crashed. every. single. time. So not even computers (or at least chrome browsers) can truly comprehend what a billion looks like.

Join the Billionares

Annual Income


How Long Until I'm A Billionare?

Footnotes

[1]Although I would like to see his tax returns to confirm ;)

[2]As my astute sister-in-law pointed out, I'm assuming 0 inflation and a 0 interest rate over the course of 20,000 years. If you assume something simple like a 1% annual interest rate for 20,000 years, then $1 now would become $267,593,557,235,055,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in the year 22,016.

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