#wealth hoarding is garbage

Someone with a billion dollars could eat at a different fancy restaurant every day for a year, once for lunch and once for dinner. When he pays his bill, he can drop a one million dollar tip on that check, automatically making his server a millionaire.

Every day. For a whole year. At a different restaurant.

This would make 730 new millionaires in one year--and the man would still have 270 million dollars. Even if his annual bill total came to one million dollars (spoiler warning: if he rang up a $1000 tab every meal, that would only be $730k), he would still have 269.

To put that in perspective, he could continue to spend $1000 on every meal and tip 100% every time (two servers leave work with a solid grand in cash every day), and he could survive on that budget for almost two whole centuries. 

And this is just assuming the person sold all of his assets and wound up with a lump sum of one billion that he could spend for the rest of his life. This isn’t “a  man makes one billion dollars a year” or “a man is worth 73 billion”, this is a simple one-billion-dollar estimate.

I know this still doesn’t have an impact, so let’s point out what it takes to spend $1000 on a meal: you buy you and nine friends a hundred dollars of food and drink. Everyone can eat a $50 steak, you can drop $30 on individual appetizers and salads, and buy two $100 bottles of wine. Every night. And every lunch. And you could do this every day for 1.5 million dollars a year. Going with the above estimate of 269 million, you couldn’t run out of that in your lifetime if you tried...as far as food goes. But even if you set aside 50 million dollars for living expenses--literally a thousand times more than some people plan for--you would be able to live this life for at least a century.