Self-made billionaires biography of christopher columbus

October 12, observed yesterday as a holiday, is most commonly known as Columbus Day in the United States, but is also recognized as Dia de la Raza throughout Latin America, as well as Indigenous People’s Day. Fraught with controversy, the various iterations of this holiday reflect the range of perspectives on Christopher Columbus and his legacies. The Columbus Day of my youth celebrates the heroic “discoverer” of the Americas, playing up mythical stories of his genius on insisting the world was round, and often neglecting the icky bits about the ensuing genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Dia de la Raza, or Day of the Race, recognizes his 1492 arrival as the origin of Hispanic peoples in the Americas, the living results of European and indigenous offspring. Some criticize this celebration of what was for many a forced and unbalanced encounter, and others take it as recognition of ancestral roots, for better or for worse.

October 12, 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival to the New World, marked the first Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People, as declared by a coalition of Native American groups in Northern California, in accordance with ideas discussed at First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance. Several states have since followed suit, getting rid of Columbus Day celebrations in favor of Indigenous People’s Day.

In recognition of this complex history, I present a brief exploration of depictions of Christopher Columbus and interpretations of his legacy in the Americas.

Billionaires should not exist.

Bernie Sanders says billionaires should not exist. I couldn’t agree more. I find the fact of billionaires’ existence astounding, especially given how much money $1,000,000,000 actually is.

Most of the time, we don’t think about it. We use words like “billionaire” and “a billion dollars,” but rarely do we stop to comprehend the sheer size of these numbers.

Consider this: If you worked every day, making $5,000 a day, from the time Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492 to the time you’re reading this, you still would not be a billionaire. (The math is simple: $5000 x 365 days x 528 years = $963,600,000.)

Even that might not register, so try this: if you work a full-time job (8 hours/day) at a living wage ($15/hour), you only make $120/day.

Or if you make what I do ($70,000/year), you get about $191/day.

Or this: if you receive compensation equivalent to the president of Allegheny College, you get (according to 2017 data) $432,428/year, or $1,184/day.

That means you’d have to make four times the president of Allegheny College just to get up to $5,000/day … and make it every day for 527 years (since Columbus) — and you still would not be a billionaire.

That’s a lot of money.

For some, however, it’s just chump change.

Consider Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the richest person in the world.

If you made $5,000/day every day since Columbus, you’d still have less money than Bezos accumulates in one week (that’s right, one week).

That’s because Bezos has a net worth of $114 billion, which comes to roughly $2.2 billion a week, or $312 million a day. In fact, Bezos probably accumulated somewhere between $300,000 to $500,000 just within the timespan it took you to read this far.

And he’s not the only one. There are 607 billionaires in the U.S., including the guy currently occupying the White House, and most of them are multi-billionaires, meaning they amass more than $100 per second.

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What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?

The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.

For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.

That means we probably won’t become billionaires.

When billionaires first become billionaires, they have a different answer to the question of what they’d do if they reached a billion dollars: “I’d figure out how to make two billion.” This is a trait that pretty much every billionaire has. If they didn’t, they’d give enough of their wealth away to become a mere hundred millionaire.

The billionaire’s answer is what’s known as an infinite regress, in which every answer produces another answer, an ever-higher sum, an endless pursuit of wealth—an unquenchable thirst. At the level of a billionaire, it’s absurd, grotesque even. (If you started spending $5,000 per day, 365 days a year, it would take you just 547 years to exhaust a billion dollars; for perspective, Christopher Columbus landed in America 531 years ago).

Billionaires, for all their flaws, are interesting—precisely because you can learn unique insights when you examine humanity at its extremes. Just as our understanding of t