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Comment by mtarnovan | Hacker News Reader

Hyperbolic comparisons like these are very off-putting for me too, but I see them everywhere, presumably "for effect". The effect in this instance is that I stopped reading.

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I'd saying having the yearly GDP of Bulgaria as AUM is still pretty impressive. And the point is more to contextualize. It's hard when you get past the millions to understand exactly how much we're talking about.

It's a bit odd though because I doubt the majority of readers will have any direct experience with Bulgaria to put it in context. It's like trying to explain X in terms of Y, when Y is equally unfamiliar.

"The yearly GDP of a sovereign nation, albeit a relatively small and poor one" is a lot more meaningful than $50b without context, I'd think.

It is 1/4th of Toyota's or Volkswagen's revenue of one year, so not that much. And last time I checked they did not create a game for recruiting tech talent either.

Oh, only a quarter of the yearly revenue of the world's fifth-largest company by revenue, or the second-largest if we exclude state-run enterprises (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...). Alright then.

Still stock vs flow.

So what? I'm not trying to claim they're bigger than Bulgaria.

If somebody compared the distance traveled by some object to the length of a football field, you could similarly object that the football field is stationary, the object isn't as long as that, etc., but none of those things are the point of the comparison, right?

Not really: https://www.nbim.no/en/

I mean, if your reference point is a state fund run by the government of an OECD country I suppose it's not that big.

That is being overly sensitive.

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