At the height of the Enron mania, the company’s market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.
There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet, so there are a lot of characters to play.
I think TARP was the most defining vote since I’ve been in Congress. It was wrong. You don’t nationalize private – it was wrong. It desensitized people to what $700 billion was, which opened the door for a $900 million stimulus, for Obamacare, for all these things. It was wrong. It broke my heart.
I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.
All told, these profit levels have put the world’s five largest publicly traded oil companies on track to earn more than $100 billion before year’s end. Yet, at the same time that Big Oil’s bottom line is going up, so are Americans’ energy costs.
You probably need 1/10 of the world’s population for us to continue to exist. There’s just too many damn people. You have to somehow get us from 7 billion people to… I don’t know what the magic number is, but I imagine at some point, that will happen. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m making the cut.
The future of the world’s film industry is in China because we have 1.3 billion people.
When I write stuff and I help cast it, I turn away good people all the time. I may turn them down because this one’s too tall and that one doesn’t have a high enough voice or this one looks to old to match up with that one – there’s a billion reasons not to hire somebody.
To affordably feed the next billion people, we must have higher-yielding crops with even greater nutritional value. America should be at the vanguard of the innovative advances that will make this happen.
In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet’s projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.
You know how many movies it took Tom Cruise before he was making 5, 6 million dollars? It probably took a billion dollars in box office.
We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
I was with Ted Turner when he came to see Kofi Annan – the Secretary-General of the UN – to announce his decision to put $1 billion to the service of UN projects and programs.
I have made more money than I ever thought anybody should ever make. But who cares if you’re worth $500 million or $1 billion? That is not what I want to be remembered for, but for giving something back.
I opposed Clinton’s budget deal in 1997 because he brought in $115 billion cut in Medicare that created greater pressure for providers not to participate.
Congress has funded numerous programs to provide care and compensation to 9/11 victims, spending several billion dollars on extraordinary and unprecedented efforts.
There are certainly a billion, ker-trillion girls out there more attractive than I am.
The oceans that surround the world produce 185 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Man per annum only produces six billion tons, so what could possibly be the concern?
I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people’s thoughts? Because what we don’t talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.
The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world – a lot of them in Russia as you all know I’m sure.
When I started out in Facebook, it had only 20 people. I saw it grow to a thousand employees and from five million users to over a billion users. I saw it evolve from a service that served college students to one that served the world.
I grew up in Chicago, but for the last 28 years I’ve lived in Moscow and London, and am now a British citizen. From 1996 to 2005, my firm, Hermitage Capital, was one of the largest investment advisers in Russia with more than $4 billion invested in Russian stocks.
We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.
When I was in N.Y. bartending, I was in a billion music videos. I was in Madonna, George Michael, Salt-n-Pepa – it goes on and on.
Somebody with a billion followers can tweet, ‘See my movie,’ and it can still tank. Followers don’t always translate into success because I think people are too savvy. When something takes off, it’s because people are connecting to it – not because someone with a lot of followers says to care about it.
Do you know how much coal China burns? In 2013, we already were burning 3.6 billion tons. And do you know how much coal the rest of the world burns? We burn more than the rest of the world combined.
And also, we are providing, you know, a nuclear power plant in the north, two light water systems, so some 4 or 5 billion dollars we are providing to meet with North Korean requests on the condition North Korea will not produce a nuclear weapon.
After almost half a billion dollars spent on the computer registration system for Obamacare, the website coughed, sputtered, and appeared to descend into an immediate coma as millions tried to log on. One reason is that the Obama administration never fully tested it.
Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can’t be treated or cannot be treated economically.
You’re going to hear a lot from President Obama and yes, from Joe Biden, you’re hearing a little bit about Medicare these days. What they will not tell you is they turned Medicare into a piggybank to fund ‘Obamacare.’ They took $716 billion dollars to pay for the ‘Obamacare’ program.
The larger point is this: We’ve invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We’ve given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country.
At Unilever, we operate in 190 countries with two billion people using our products daily. We take climate seriously because we know that it impacts those two billion people – and that means it impacts us, too.
If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.
You could be worth $2 billion today and a half a billion tomorrow. It doesn’t take much for this to disappear overnight.
We’re being challenged to do something so profound, it’s unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn’t be more at stake. It’s not even our species at stake; it’s the whole dream of life on earth that’s taken 4.5 billion years to realize – all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.
The experts who managed the original Marshall Plan say Afghanistan needs a commitment of at least $5 to $10 billion over 5 to 10 years, coupled with occupation forces of 250,000 Allied soldiers to keep the peace throughout the country.
The world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.
We need a pope to usher in a new era of inclusion, the end of a sinful clericalism, and a strong sense of duty to those on society’s margins. The 1 billion faithful long for a leader who is fearless and driven – not by terror but by love.
This war so far has cost us $125 billion and counting, because largely we decided to do it on our own, with only the United Kingdom as a paying, fully participating partner.
Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they’ve been told they have lots in common.
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn’t mean you have to use them all in a solo.
I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.
And let us not forget the Social Security system. Recent studies show that undocumented workers sustain the Social Security system with a subsidy as much as $7 billion a year. Let me repeat that: $7 billion a year.
In its best prewar year, Europe with almost 300 million people had a gross national product of 150 billion dollars. In that same year, the United States with 150 million people had a gross national product of 300 billion dollars.
The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.
Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.
People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you’ll never see the headlines say, ‘Six billion people got along rather well today.’ You’ll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.
