Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person
I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. People generally think of normal(ish) distributions like height, where if you're 10% taller or shorter than average, you're a tall or short person, and 40% taller makes you the tallest person in the world. In comparison, wealth has a very, very long tail, making it hard to comprehend.<p>Here's what I've come up with to visualize wealth in the United States. Suppose you start counting, going up by 1 million dollars every second, and people sit down when you reach their net worth. Most people will sit down immediately. After about 9 seconds, people in the "1%" will start sitting down. Near the 17 minute mark, billionaires would start sitting down. Donald Trump would sit down just before the hour mark. A day later - an hour and 10 minutes into the <i>second</i> day of billionaires sitting down - Bill Gates would sit, followed by Jeff Bezos just three minutes later.<p>The point of this is there's a huge range of billionaires (analogous to comparing 17 minutes to a day). The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). (I should also mention that there should be huge error bars on reported net worth numbers.)