$1,000 = one thousand

$1,000,000 = one thousand thousand = one million

$1,000,000,000 = one thousand million = one billion

 What could we do with one billion dollars? With a little help from the robot overlord, I performed some cost estimates to brainstorm the possibilities:

• A mid-sized grocery store costs about $5 million to build and start operating. With a billion bucks, we could establish 200 brand-new grocery stores in rural food deserts across the U.S. (A rural food dessert is a low-income census tract at least 10 miles from the nearest grocery store. See the map excerpts below for context.)

• The daily cost to provide a free meal to a student is: $4.43. Over a school year of 180 days, that comes to $797.40 per kid. Let’s just round up to $800. With a billion dollars, we could provide a year’s worth of meals to 1,250,000 kids. For $40 billion, we could offer lunch to every school-aged kid in the country (about 50 million students).

• The starting cost for a utility-scale wind turbine is about $2 million. With a billion dollars, we could offset fossil fuel usage by building 500 wind turbines.

Rural Food Deserts. Screen snips from Food Access Research Atlas: www.ers.usda.gov

 Those are just a few ideas, off the top of my head.

What would you do with a billion bucks?

The crazy thing is, even a billion dollars is modest, in the grand scheme of things. For Fiscal Year 2024, the U.S. federal budget was $6.75 trillion.

Let’s go back to our calculations above …

If $1,000,000,000 = one thousand million = one billion,

then $1,000,000,000,000 = one thousand billion = one trillion,

which means $6,750,000,000,000 = six thousand seven hundred fifty billion.

Elon Musk’s net worth is currently estimated at $420 billion ($420,000,000,000) and growing exponentially by the day. It’s unfathomable to me that one person alone could hoard so much wealth; it adds up to more than 6% of our entire federal budget. Musk could singlehandedly cover nearly the entire allocation that goes toward benefits for veterans and all other federal retirements – that’s about 21 million retirees.

Together, the “broligarchs” (Musk, Zuckerburg, Bezos, and their ilk) could radically change the world and alter the course of future generations for the better. Instead, we have park rangers, medical researchers, and Veterans Affairs staffers losing their jobs because of so-called wasteful spending??

I cannot make it make sense.

References (in case anyone cares):

Rural food deserts. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas

School Meal Reimbursement Rates. https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/reimbursement-rates?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Musk’s contractual income. https://www.uniladtech.com/news/elon-musk-paid-8million-first-doge-hearing-186045-20250213

Federal budget. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/#key-takeaways

Federal tax dollars. https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go