THE BILLIONAIRES CLUB

IT'S HARD FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE TO WRAP THEIR HEADS AROUND THE IDEA OF HAVING SO MUCH MONEY, BUT FOR THE 3 000 OR SO PEOPLE WHO ARE MEMBERS OF THIS ELITE GROUP IT'S ALL JUST A NUMBERS GAME, ACCORDING TO THE AUTHORS OF A FASCINATING NEW BOOK THAT LOOKS AT THE HABITS OF THE SUPER-RICH

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LOOKING at a sky filled with stars makes you feel simultaneously full of wonder and insignificant. That's pretty much what happens when you try to get your head around a billion. It's such a vast number, it defies comprehension. Yet, like the endless universe, it fascinates us.

Trying to grasp a billion can stretch your mind. To help her students make sense of the enormity of the numbers involved, Anne Monk, a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, explained how long it would take them to reach $1 billion (R16bn) if they could save $100 (R1 600) a day.

A simple sum: a billion (1 000 000 000) divided by 100 equals 10 000 000. This means it would take 10 million days (or 27 000 years and a whole chunk of change) to save $1bn.

Obviously, Monk's students wouldn't get there in their lifetime. The lecturer worked out that it would take about 304 generations of their descendants saving $100 a day for their family lines to reach $1bn. And that's only if they and each of their 304 descendants all lived to 90.

It's difficult to save $1bn, but it's easy to spend it, right? Not so fast. If you spent $10 000 every day, it would take nearly 274 years to burn through $1bn.

Now, picture a stack of dollar bills, each 0,10922mm thick. A million-dollar stack is 109,22m — that's taller than the Statue of Liberty (93m).

A billion dollar bills is 109km — 287 Empire State Buildings stacked vertically, piercing the edge of space.

Numbers can feel bewildering, so let's try visualising a billion using Dalmatians. It's easy enough to picture 10 energetic white dogs with black spots romping in a park. But imagine 10 groups of 10 Dalmatians. That's what Walt Disney Productions did in 1961 when it adapted Dodie Smith's 1956 novel into an animated adventure comedy, One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Scale up to 10 groups of 100 Dalmatians each and you've got 1 000 spotted good boys.