Tom's Notes—Intellectual Billionaires

Doesn't it make you just wonder how a billionaire gets a billion?

Think of it: a thousand million pounds, dollars, euros, whatever—when you've got a thousand thousand thousand of them, the currency doesn't really matter (unless it's Zimbabwean). This is 1 with nine zeroes; enough capital write off a small nation's debt for a year. It's mind-boggling: 1 man, or 1 woman, with enough money to run a small country for a year, none of it credit. Take Bill Gates, his fortune is about 53 billion. The world population is about 6.7 billion. That's almost 8 dollars from every single man woman and child on the face of the planet into Bill's bank account (for example). If you had a billion pound coins and laid them on the ground side by side, you'd make a line 22,500km long: over half the circumference of the Earth. That's like a loop of quids around the entire continent of South America, and more—you'd start the loop in New York and stop in San Francisco. If you had 2 billion pound coins you'd be able to go in a straight line from wherever you are and arrive back at the same spot with 222 thousand pounds left to spare—enough to build a house out of pound coins. It's a huge number of pounds or dollars or euros or whatevers to have. Huge.

How does one person get all that?

I tell you what makes me wonder—how a person like Frank Kermode or C.G. Jung or Marie Curie gets all that knowledge. I think of them as intellectual billionaires. I just can't fathom how one person could know so much.

[By the by: I don't count geniuses like Einstein or Beethoven in with them—geniuses create knowledge rather than accumulate it (though they accumulate an Olympian amount, no doubt). No, geniuses are a little different.]

Read the writings of an intellectual billionaire and feel tiny and resentful—in just the same way you feel tiny and resentful about the staggering amount of money some people have. Bill Gates could give me a million dollars, and it'd only be one fifty-thousandth of his fortune. That's only 0.002% of his total—so painless it wouldn't even register for Bill; and it'd make me a millionaire.

But I'd rather I had 0.002% of an intellectual billionaire's fortune. At least, I think would...