Ok so how does a cancer kill its host?
It grows until it consumes so many nutrients that the other living cells don’t get enough. The host literally starves even if he eats plentifully.
The same applies for the US: The billionaires are not only hoarding wealth, but by doing so they’re crippling the economy for workers and everybody besides themselves.
People think they understand numbers like billion because they understand thousand and billion is just thousand times thousand (million) times thousand. Multiplication is fairly intuitive, but exponentiation is not. Without explicitly thinking it through people feel like 1000^3 is not very different from 1000 * 3.
It’s the same reason the lottery fools so many people into gambling their money away.
People know what a million euros is, and having that 1000x is not that weird to reason about