Bill’s Fortune =&3_@#EE4? Dollars

While poverty will soon be nipping at the heels of many here in the CNMI, the well-heeled in the mainland are living it up. Consider, for example, the fortunes of Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world with a fortune pegged at $90 billion.

$90 BILLION? That’s an eye popping number. Heck, a lot of people can’t even write out the number. Well, here it is:
$90,000,000,000.00

My calculator can’t even handle the number. It chokes on all those digits and resorts to “scientific notation,” (where $90 Big Ones is tallied as “9_10” meaning 10 to the 10th power times nine). Can you imagine having so much money that you need a computer just to record the number itself?

Probably not. But you can imagine buying a house, right? I don’t shop for houses here, I’m not allowed to own them, but out of habitual shopping instinct I check the listings for homes in my old neighborhood in a rural community. $110,000 will buy a very nice house back home.

I’m not spending $110,000 on a whim, though. I’d really have to think that one over. Bill Gates wouldn’t sweat it, though. Mr. Gates could buy a $110,000 house every single hour of every single day, 365 days a year, for the next 93 years.

What if he invested his money in bonds instead of houses? Something safe, like government bonds? At an interest rate of a mere six percent per year? That would come to a tidy $5.4 billion in interest per year, or almost $15 million per DAY in interest. Along these lines, assuming Mr. Gates takes a breath every three seconds, he would be earning over $500 each breath in interest payments.

I assume that most of his fortune is the paper value of Microsoft stock. But what if his fortune was just plain old cash?

To the bank, then. Where your banker will remind you that accounts are insured to a limit of $100,000. Faced with that, Mr. Gates would have to open 900,000 bank accounts at one hundred grand each. I doubt there are even 900,000 bank branches in the entire United States. If there were, and if it took one hour to open an account, based on a 40 hour week it would take Mr. Gates 433 years to open enough of these accounts to handle his cash.

Okay, perhaps it’s easier to stash that money under the mattress. I called a local bank and asked how high a stack of 100 $20 bills is. Answer: one inch (for circulated bills, not banded). A stack of Andrew Jacksons high enough to hold Mr. Gates’ fortune would therefore be 710 miles high. That’s 129 times higher than Mount Everest. That would make for one heck of a lump under the old Posture-Pedic, eh?

Well, my calculator is huffing and puffing now and giving answers like “&3_@#EE4?” So much for double-checking my calculations. But this we know with certainty: Bill Gates is one rich dude, no doubt about it.