These 25 People Made $10,000 a Minute Last Year

They’re the top paid hedge fund managers, and boy did they make a lot of money last year. If you want to know how long it would take you to earn what they earned in just 2015, keep reading. If you find harsh reality upsetting, stop now. (Just kidding, keep reading.)

Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine put out its ranking of the top-earning hedge fund managers earlier this month, showing that the top 25 earners averaged $517.6 million in 2015 for a total of $12.94 billion. That breaks down to about $4.7 million per day for each manager, or roughly $10,000 per minute.

Let’s put that into perspective. Ten thousand dollars a minute is basically enough to buy the world’s most expensive burger for lunch ($1,786, including the gold leaf and truffles), and still have plenty left over from your first hour’s earnings to take a two-week-long private-island vacation on Musha Cay for $37,500 per day (for up to 12 guests).

So how long would it take the average American to earn $517.6 million? Here’s the scary math: Using the latest statistics from the government, the average American household earns $51,939, or about $25 an hour. At that rate, it would take about 10,000 years. Basically, that’s working continually since the Ice Age around 8000 B.C.

To match the top earning hedge fund manager at $1.7 billion, the average household would need to toil three times that long, or 30,000 years – basically since humans first started drawing pictures on cave walls.

To look at it another way, every resident of Sedona, Arizona, (Population 10,111 in 2013) would need to make that $51,939 to match one manager’s salary. To match the highest paid hedge fund manager, every resident would have to earn more than three times that, or roughly $170,000 a year.

If you aren’t dizzy yet, here’s another view:

The top 25 hedge fund managers earned more than all of the country’s kindergarten teachers combined. As Bernie Sanders pointed out – that’s 58,000 teachers earning just $8.5 billion in total.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the top hedge fund managers even earned more than some major companies. Venerable shoemaker Nike, for example, earned $8.03 billion in 2015.

While you may never earn as much as a hedge fund manager, there’s plenty you can do to solidify your finances. You can start an emergency fund to ensure unexpected expenses don’t put you in a jam. You can pay off your credit cards every month and minimize other debts you owe to keep your credit in tip-top shape. And you can track your credit health by pulling your free annual credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com and checking your free credit scores, updated every 14 days, on Credit.com.

These 25 People Made $10,000 a Minute Last Year

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