You might remember the news from a few weeks ago that Michael Bloomberg, financial media mogul and former mayor of New York City, gave $1.8 billion dollars to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.
We see big numbers bounced around so much now that we barely notice them anymore, but I can assure you 1,800,000,000 is a very big number. If you earn $50,000 a year, it would have taken you 36,000 years to earn that that amount of money (meaning that you would have had had to start 25,000 years before the end of the last ice age, and 18,000 years before there were any humans in North America). According to Forbes magazine, had he thrown in an additional 5 percent, Bloomberg could have cornered the marked on Florida baseball by purchasing both the Tampa Bay Rays and the Miami Marlins.
Read Don O’Shea’s entire editorial here.