This is a snapshot of a Tweet in my feed. Painful to read for a few reasons, the grammar, of course, is the least of it.

Let’s start with US population. 327.2 million as of 2018. If we agree it’s close to 333 million, that’s 1/3 of a billion. In other words, $3 per person adds to $1B dollars. In which case, $460B isn’t quite $1400 per person. But, of course, even Jeff Bezos, the US richest person, is ‘only’ worth $114B. And Bloomberg might have spent $460M, not billion. Bloomberg is worth about $64 billion, and that divides to a number closer to $200 per person.

This, to me, is classic innumeracy, the inability to think about how absurd the tweet above was, before hitting “send”. As far as the grammar goes, I blame J. Geils for this one.