If you want it back, you'll have to pay me... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
https://i.imgsafe.org/e67e51e876.jpg
_________________________________
Steven Seagal Fan Club President
The thing about that particular joke, as funny as it is due to inflation and the world changing - I mean, if they already make billions of dollars legitimately, why would any 'evil organization' need to do criminal things to earn more money anyway..? (That's part of the joke, I think - how obsolete and old-fashioned those old Bond movie villains seem in the era of evil corporations that rake in more money due to people's stupidity than any evil villain of any movie has ever tried to acquire).
It's like the old Bond movie villains don't even seem all that evil compared to modern corporations that psychopathically make people starve, kill people to gain resources, wealth and money, and then dupe stupid people into buying their crappy and overpriced products that no one needs and that makes everyone unhealthy and obese..
..compared to all these corporations are doing every day as an 'accepted fact' to what the Bond villains do, I would actually GLADLY trade the corporate evil to the 'villain evil', as it's much lesser an evil.
The other layer that causes that joke to work so well and be so funny, is that people don't REALLY understand anything 'big enough', like big numbers, or vast amounts of money (or stars in the Universe).
When I watched the 'Tribal people react to the size of the Universe' video in youtube, I realized I don't have the capacity to understand sizes that big. Heck, I am lucky if I can even cram a relatively tiny galaxy into my head - the distances, amounts, size, mass.. it just so quickly overflows my brain.
It's the same thing with more mundane objects. I don't think anyone can really properly understand and grasp the concept of 300 000 grains of sand. What kind of amount would that be, how big a pile would it be, how many trucks would you need to haul it? Most people probably can't immediately imagine the exact correct amount and size. It's just a number with lots of zeros, psychologically speaking.
Add one zero, and psychologically it FEELS like just adding "ONE" (something) to the mix.
You don't instantly feel the size increase a TENFOLD (which would be massive, when talking about 300 000 anything).
Now, when you reach something like 'a million', this 'incomprehension problem' accelerates. It becomes even harder to understand. I mean, 'ten thousand' something we can maybe somehow wrap our heads around, but a million? Can you imagine a million seashells on a beach? What would it look like?
The problem is, zeroes just look like tiny circles, they don't have the power to expand or describe sizes or amounts very well. Words are even worse. It's SO easy to say 'million', but it's just as easy to say 'billion'. Hundred billion doesn't SEEM that much bigger than a 'million' - it's just wordplay, psychologically speaking.
However, just how much bigger it is, was once demonstrated by a youtuber by driving a car and making sure the viewer understand the equivalent distance of a 'million' first, before driving to scale that to a billion, or something like that. I think his name is 'Tom', not sure.
A hundred billion is -ridiculousy- enormous compared to 'milion'. It's so much bigger, you'd need some kind of very concretical comparison points, and even still you might not get it.
Basically, if you imagine a kilometer and then compare that to 100 000 kilometers... well, it's basically difficult to imagine '100 000 kilometers', as we never see that kind of distance in our daily lives.
My point is, that adding zeroes, no matter how many, just never quite adequately makes us properly understand just how much something is. Using a word seems pretty much the same 'million', 'billion' and 'quadrillion' seem pretty much 'the same', psychologically speaking, even if we know mathematically, how much difference there is. It's just a 'big number'.
This is why the joke works so well, because even the audiences can't QUITE comperehend just how different the amounts are.