My coffee money
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Melinda Gates wants me to give up my coffee to save the life of a kid by using the 13¢ plus a possible $3 to buy some vaccines. Coffee. Melinda Gates wants MY COFFEE MONEY, presumably once a year.
Bill and Melinda are worth 54 billion dollars. That looks like this when you put some zeros to it: $54,000,000,000.00. My net worth is less. Melinda would have to give up more than coffee to become my equal. She would have to give up 99.9995% of her holdings. Bottom line: she would need to spend $53,999,800,000 to become my fiscal peer. That money could provide the $3.13 for 17,252,332,268 children. Seventeen billion kids. And this is quite convenient as there are no more than two billion children in the world.
In fact that means the money saved on the fifteen billion non-existent kids she doesn’t need to pay for would leave her with $47,739,799,998 (47.7 billion dollars).
She can buy every kid in the world the vaccines she wants me to buy and still be so obscenely rich that she has more money than the annual gross domestic products of the following 113 countries.
- Saint Lucia
- Gambia
- British Virgin Islands
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Gibraltar
- Djibouti
- Bhutan
- Belize
- Maldives
- Burundi
- San Marino
- Cape Verde
- Lesotho
- Sierra Leone
- Greenland
- Central African Republic
- Guyana
- Cayman Islands
- Eritrea
- Aruba
- Somalia
- Faroe Islands
- Isle of Man
- Guernsey
- Guam
- Togo
- Fiji
- Swaziland
- Kosovo
- Suriname
- New Caledonia
- Mauritania
- Montenegro
- Barbados
- Guinea
- Kyrgyzstan
- Malawi
- Curacao
- Liechtenstein
- Jersey
- Moldova
- Zimbabwe
- Tajikistan
- Niger
- Rwanda
- Mongolia
- French Polynesia
- Laos
- Nicaragua
- Benin
- Haiti
- West Bank
- Bahamas
- Chad
- Malta
- Madagascar
- Burkina Faso
- Papua New Guinea
- Armenia
- Mali
- Macedonia
- Mauritius
- Mozambique
- Georgia
- Cambodia
- Namibia
- Albania
- Congo, Republic of the
- Brunei
- Botswana
- Gabon
- Congo, Democratic Republic of the
- Senegal
- Iceland
- Jamaica
- Equatorial Guinea
- Nepal
- Honduras
- Zambia
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Afghanistan
- Uganda
- Paraguay
- Ghana
- Estonia
- Bolivia
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Bahrain
- El Salvador
- Cameroon
- Macau
- Cote d’Ivoire
- Tanzania
- Cyprus
- Latvia
- Jordan
- Panama
- Turkmenistan
- Korea, North
- Yemen
- Ethiopia
- Kenya
- Costa Rica
- Burma
- Lithuania
- Uzbekistan
- Serbia
- Lebanon
- Uruguay
- Guatemala
- Tunisia
- Bulgaria
- Slovenia
And not to belabor it but if we’re still judging by net worth, $3.13 of my money is equivalent to $845,100 of hers. I’d like to see her give up her coffee money.
Me: Actually the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has more than $30 billion in its coffers and gives away at least 5% a year to maintain its charity status; meaning, she gives away her coffee money more than a thousand times a year. All three cups a day. And she does it on things like vaccines for kids, and business and environmentally friendly financial services for the poor around the globe.
Myself: I knew that. Yeah, I knew that. Do you think I didn’t know that? It’s so funny that you’d think I wouldn’t know that.
