I like to think of $1 billion in terms of how much money you need to spend. Let's say you're given $1 billion at birth, never earn another cent in your life, and live for exactly 75 years. To spend all of that money, you'd need to spend $36,500 per day, every day, for your entire life. Even then, you'd have nearly a million dollars left to pass down to your children.
If you only spent 36,500 a day, you'd probably die far far richer (like, 10s of billions) than you were born assuming you have it invested. You could spend more like 100k a day (adjusting up for inflation) and you'd probably almost certainly die a billionaire.
It feels elusive how anyone could spend so much, but controlling the content of mass media has been of great service for the interests of the Kochs and the Wilkses.