Bill Gates has, once again, topped the Forbes rich list. He’s worth $48billion, apparently. Just consider that number for a moment. $48billion. It’s an incomprehensible amount of money. If he spent $10 million – more money than most people see in their lifetimes, and a life-changing amount for most people – he would still have $47.99 billion dollars left – barely a dent. If he were a country, he would be the 54th richest (by GDP) in the world – richer than Morocco, Luxembourg, Ecuador and Croatia. In order to get through it all by the time he died (let’s be generous and consider that he will die at 100 – he’s got the money to spend on healthcare, after all), he would have to spend at the rate of $2.6million a day – and that’s not even considering the interest he’s accruing on that which, at a fairly conservative rate of 2% would be $1billion a year, or $2.7million a day.

Let’s think of this another way. A dollar bill is about 15x6cm, and we’ll say it’s 0.1mm thick, for the sake of argument. An decent sized mattress would be, say, 2m x 2m. You could cover the mattress with about 476 dollar bills, with a bit of overlap at the edges. He would need a stack of about 100.8 million of these layers to pile all his money up – or a stack about 10,080m high. Terminal velocity of a human body is about 120mph, or about 55m/s. It will only take a couple of seconds to accelerate to this speed, so for sufficiently large amounts of time, it will be this velocity, not the acceleration due to gravity that will be the overriding factor.

If Bill Gates had piled all of his money up underneath his mattress, and fell out of bed in the middle of the night, it would take him just over 3 minutes – 183 seconds, give or take – to hit the ground.

And with all that in mind, the stingy git still won’t lend me a tenner.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2004 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.