Billionaire

 Imaging being merely the 500th richest billionaire on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index of the 500 richest people in the world; you’d have a fortune of just around $7 billion, some $360 billion less than Elon Musk, at #1 currently.

How impoverished you would feel!

You wouldn’t have the money to buy the sort of yacht whose size requires dismantling a port city bridge to float it from drydock out to sea that the extra super-duper wealthy folks can easily swing; your wedding reception might only last three days or renting out an entire neighborhood in Venice rather than the weeklong extravaganza doing so of those in the top ten; you could only fund a wing of the state-of-the-art hospital in Beverly Hills as opposed to the whole facility, and maybe worst of all, instead of buying the New York Yankees, you’ve have to settle for the Pittsburgh Pirates or Florida Marlins.

Heaven forfend!

The internet says that the billion dollars could buy you 2882 Ferraris; so your meagre fortune could only allow you 8646 of them; not nearly enough for you to give one away to 10,000 of your best friends.

Sucks!

Here’s another relevant internet factoid: “The average in-state college student spends $9,750 per year on tuition at a public university.  Your $1 billion could pay off all four years of school for well over 25,000 students.”

But you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?  After all, you could alternately spend one of your paltry billions on 41 private Beyoncé concerts and still have $16,000 left over.

Much better!

If you were number 500 on the Billionaire Index, how likely would you be to subscribe to the view that billionaires shouldn’t exist?  Would you accept the conclusion, or would that be impossible, operating like Descartes’ Cogito, to prove, by deductive logic, that billionaires should exist?

I billion, therefore I am?

But perhaps it's an empirical question; if so, sign me up for a test case.