I just read a report about the 10 richest Americans, whose combined wealth now totals more than $1 trillion.
I'm trying to get a feeling for what $1,000,000,000,000 actually means, not just in terms of wealth but also power and influence. Here's one approach that comes to mind--the Blue Whale scale.
Let's represent the $1 trillion combined wealth of those 10 richest Americans by Earth's largest and most massive creature, the majestic Blue whale. A Blue whale might weigh in at 100 metric tonnes or 100,000 kg and grow to 30 meters--100 feet--in length.
Now, picture a spreadsheet with three columns that match up wealth with weight and with appropriately sized sea creatures. That's our Blue Whale scale. At the top is $1,000,000,000,000, 100,000 kg and a Blue whale. We'll keep dividing by ten as wealth and weight go down, and the sea creatures will get smaller and lighter accordingly.
For example, the next step down from $1 trillion would include those individuals worth $100 billion or more. Elon Musk, for example is worth $263 billion. On the whale scale he would weigh in at 26 metric tons and could be represented by a teenage Blue whale. Lesser multi-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates on down to Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett still fall in the $100 billion range. On our whale scale, they would weigh in at 10 to 20 metric tonnes and might be represented by Humpback whales of varying sizes.
What about the rich and powerful one percenters that we hear so much about? Sadly for them, we have to step down 4 orders of magnitude--a factor of 10,000--to get down to the wealthiest one percent of US households, worth $10 million or more. On our Blue Whale scale, they would weigh in at a measly 1 kg, or 2.2 lbs. That's miniscule compared to any whale of course; we can represent a one-percenter as a one-year-old salmon swimming up-river for the first time.
How about a middle-class American family? It turns out that the median wealth of American families is just under $122,000. Half of us are worth more than that, half less. To step down from $1 trillion to the $100,000 range we need to divide by 10 million.
That means that the 10 richest Americans are worth 10 million times as much as the median US household. Or that it would take the combined worth of 10 million median households to match the wealth of the 10 richest Americans.
Picture a giant teeter-totter with Musk, Bezos, Gates and their seven $100-billion-plus buds on one side, and 10 million American families on the other--and it balances!
On our Blue Whale scale, that median family would weigh in at just 10 grams, about the same as the proverbial "two nickels to rub together." In the fish world that might be represented by a sardine; you know, the kind you buy packed by the dozens into a tin, or that swarm by the thousands as shown below.
Of course, if you're below the median wealth--for example in the 25 percent of US families whose net worth is $10,000 or less--you're not represented by a sardine on the whale scale, but you might warrant a guppy or a minnow.
As the Leviathans of the deep make their majestic way through the oceans, I doubt that they worry much about, or perhaps even notice, the millions or billions of tiny fish who happen to share the seas with them. I'm guessing that it's the same with the multi-billionaires with whom we happen to share the economic, financial and political systems that we--like fish in the sea--live within.
Oh, if you're in the 20 percent of American families whose net worth is close to zero (or literally underwater), the best you can hope for is to be represented by krill--the swarms of minute sea creatures on whom--go figure--those huge Blue whales feed!
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