One billion dollars is such a huge amount of money, that there has recently emerged a whole sub-genre of images specifically designed to help us get our heads around how huge it is. If you, for instance, had earned a million a year, every year since the Battle of Hastings (that’s 1066, for non-Brits), and not spent any of it, you still wouldn’t (interest notwithstanding) be a billionaire. If you earned an annual salary of $43,000, you might eventually become a billionaire (again, not accounting for expenses or accumulated interest) — if you waited over 23,000 years.

And none of this is even accounting for the still more extreme amount of money that Jeff Bezos has managed to accumulate over the course of his lifetime: $110 billion dollars, according to one recent estimate. The other day, I overheard a couple in the pub, students I think, arguing about how much a billion was. One thought it was ten million. The second bet that it was actually a bit bigger: one hundred million. When they realized that a billion is in fact either one thousand million (“short scale,” sometimes thought of as an “American billion” by British people) or one million million (“long scale,” used officially in Britain until the mid-1970s), they couldn’t stop laughing. People actually have that amount, like that amount of currency — in money? And they’re just allowed to sort of... have it?