Time Is Money
Translating the Madoff sentence into dollars and cents
| 7:00 am Jun 30, 2009 | Print | Email / Share

The Madoff Prison Time Breakdown
CREDIT: Getty Images/AFP
Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme is estimated to have bilked investors out of $65 billion, was sentenced to 150 years in prison yesterday. If we follow a simple time-divided-by-money formula, Madoff’s sentence can be said to represent approximately $1.2 million per day. Using this figure, we’ve calculated—in Madoff prison time—how long it would take to accomplish some fairly daunting tasks:
1 hour to earn the average yearly salary of an American teacher
63 days to snag the most expensive apartment in Manhattan
91 days to match the salary of the world’s highest-paid athlete
172 days to buy up all of the ads in the Super Bowl
263 days to make the most expensive Hollywood movie in history

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