I was doing some math in my head. I’ve been thinking about housing prices and wanted to assess the rough value of my city neighborhood block.
Assuming the average value of a house in my neighborhood is a flat $500k, that means 2 houses = $1M.
Counting the houses on my street I estimated there are about 20 houses per-block, which means 1 block = 20 houses = $10M.
Continuing to scale that up by factors of 10, we get:
10 blocks = 200 houses = $100M
and
100 blocks = 2000 houses = $1B
I opened up a map to visualize 100 blocks and it’s practically my entire city neighborhood. Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Once you start trying to do anything that involves employing people (e.g. running a small business) you start realising how far a million goes. 5 software engineers in an office with equipment for a year? In a European country or USA/Canada, you’ll need the best part of a million. It’s not just salaries. There’s also employment taxes and other costs to consider.
A billion and it’s now more like 750 engineers for 15 years.