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I just can't imagine 26 billion dollars. That's beyond any human's comprehension.

• dredmorbius 10y ago
  You do it through comparisons. A typical SF Bay Area core house is running close to $1 million these days. A thousand such homes would be a billion. That's a small town, or a particular (upscale) San Francisco neighborhood, say, PacHeights or Cole Valley. Home to about 3,000 - 4,000 people. Twenty six neighborhoods would be the full LinkedIn value. Call it 26,000 homes in the San Francisco or Peninsula area. Most of Palo Alto, and a neighboring town, say, Menlo Park, or Redwood City. About 75,000 - 100,000 people. One eighth of San Francisco. The typical new car is, roughly, $26,000. A thousand of them them is $26 million. A typical freeway lane can see 2,000 cars an hour per lane, or, say for a large 10-lane freeway, 20,000 cars per hour. If you filled that highway to capacity for just over 2 days, you'd see $26 billion worth of (new) cars flowing past. A 150,000 square foot school at $300/sqft construction costs (via random DDGing) runs about $45 million. You could build about 570 such schools. Annual operating expenses of a large high school might run about $30 million. You could fund ~870 such schools for a year (or one school for 870 years). Annual petroleum consumption in the US is about 19.6 million barrels per day. The LinkedIn purchase prices would cover 26 days of $50/bbl oil for the US.