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These are some of the richest entities - forget about universities - just entities full stop, in the entire country.


Stanford’s endowment is less than $40bn.


That’s a lot of money on tap, 99.99% of US organizations have less than $1Bn in reserves.

Even among educational institutions there’s a 19+k private schools and 5,300 universities in the US. The vast majority of them don’t operate anywhere close to that scale.


Consider adding for or five more 9s to that. There are 50+ million corporations in the county, and then you need to add all the churches, clubs and nonprofits.


My 4 nines + your 4 or 5 nines = 1 in 100 million to 1 in 1 billion.

Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.


Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.

There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.

I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?


Above 90% = 1/10, 99% = 1/100, 99.9% =1/1,000… the pattern is 1 then a zero for each 9.

So 8 9’s = 100,000,000


yeah, I understand decimals.

If its 200/100,000,000, that would be 99.9998 or 2 more digits.


IMO, it’s going to be in the thousands to 10’s of thousands. Depending on what organizations you exclude and if you’re considering total assets vs net assets vs liquid assets etc.

There’s a surprising number of individual buildings worth 1+ billion each of which are going to be their own org. Add pensions, trusts, nuclear reactors, large dams, government organizations, etc.

Here’s 30 US charitable foundations over 1B which isn’t an exhaustive list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...


So, at full burn, enough to run a national laboratory for half a century. This is what rich looks like.


The national laboratory budget is $14bn/yr.


Sure, if we assume that the total budget for the 17 national labs is $14B, that would imply that the average lab is a bit less than $1B/year to run. Hence $40B can run an "average" lab for around 50 years. Or am I missing your point?


funding is not even per year to year, but your point is still valid




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