the longest entry yet
June 19th, 2003
I was just reading this article from CNNmoney about Microsoft's overwhelmingly large cash hoard. Apparently MS has (in cash) $40 billion, which brought up some very interesting stats.
"This is a mind-bogglingly large pile of dough. No other nonfinancial firm has more liquid money at its disposal, and only a handful of banks do. It's more cash than Ford, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart have combined, and nearly four times as much as Intel... It is enough to buy the entire airline industry -- twice. Or all the gold in Fort Knox, four times over. It is enough to buy 23 space shuttles or every major professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey team in America."
After doing a little searching of my own, I thought I would share what I came up with:
Pennies- If you were to stack 40 billion pennies in a single pile, one atop the other, the stack would reach nearly forty thousand miles high (just a bit farther than the planet Mars).
- The size of those pennies would be the equivalent size of 200 - 9x11x41 foot school busses.
- You could give everyone on earth 6 cents (given that there are an estimated 6 billion people on the planet these days). And you would still have $667 million left over to spend as you please.
Unfortunately, the US Mint has only manufactured 300 billion pennies since its inception in 1787, so you would fall $37,000,000,000 short of pennies if you ever tried any of these stats in the real world.
Dollars- If you had 40 billion $1 bills, and spent one every second of every day, it would require over 1268 years for you to go broke.
- If you had to carry around 40 billion in ones, you would need some rather strong people to help out. According to Phil (who did the math) $20 billion = 200 tons of $100 bills. That means $40,000,000,000 = 200,000,000 pounds of $1 bills.
- If Bill Gates decided to keep all this cash under his mattress (Bill probably sleeps on a King Size mattress, standard size = 78 by 80 inches). It would take him 397.57 bills to cover the mattress. Using all of the $40 billion (as $1 bills), he could cover the king-sized mattress with bills 79,154,384.52 bills deep. That means he would have to jump 339,718.38 inches or 5.36 miles to get from the bed to the floor each morning, not counting the thickness of the bed itself.
- If you were to have 40 billion llamas...
You get the point...
That was a long way to go just to use the word llama in the blog.
Random | Comments (2) | words in this post
i aplaud your use of the word "llama" in the blog. i've actually been waiting for its arrival for some time now. i have to lodge a formal inquiry into one of your facts. we saw "goldfinger" last night at a movie theater downtown. in that movie, mr. goldfinger breaks into ft. knox, where he claims $15billion in bullion reside. now, that was in 1963. how do you think that comports with your research that only $10billion remain in ft. knox today? if "they" have publicly stated that we are $5billion shorter now than we were 40 years ago, do you think that we are really considered WORSE off than that, in actuality? just some thoughts for the morning.
mook
Mark's old buddy, Wernher von Braun, once said: "that our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. I t would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity."
So if you decide to go our exploring, take your "neverlost" system.