Samsung Pays Apple $1 Billion Sending 30 Trucks Full of 5 Cents Coinshttp://en.paperblog.com/samsung-pays-apple...s-coins-294795/ Just for giggles, I did a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what it would take to pay a billion dollars in nickels.
A billion dollars in nickels is 20 billion nickels, or roughly 64 nickels for every man, woman, and child in the entire United States. That is almost the entire number of nickels in circulation; the total number of nickels that exists is estimated by the Treasury Department to be around 25 billion or so.
A nickel weighs a sixth of an ounce, so 20 billion nickels weighs in at 208,333,333 pounds, or 104,167 tons, give or take a few hundred pounds. In the United States, a tractor trailer is permitted to weigh no more than 80,000 pounds by law. A typical tractor trailer rig weighs in at roughly 20,000 pounds, leaving no more than 60,000 pounds for cargo. (Most commercial truckers won't haul more than 50,000 pounds, but we'll go with the 60,000 pound limit.)
At 60,000 pounds per truck, a billion dollars in nickels would require 3,473 trucks. Since a semi trailer is 53 feet long (not including the cab), the trailers, lined up end to end with no cabs, would make a row of trucks roughly 35 miles long.
I did a quick Web search to see what the shipping cost would be. From Samsung's US headquarters to Cupertino, home of Apple, the cheapest rate I could find on my quick-and-dirty search was $503 per half ton, or $104,792,002. That's about $105 million in shipping charges, though I bet a job this size might qualify for a bulk discount.
So now you know.
