Sir, – While reading the obituary for Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz (October 29th), I found occasion to use my calculator. The article suggested that 9,804 billion cans of Red Bull were sold in 2021. By my reckoning, this equates to 3.4 cans per day, for every human on the planet. Surely this couldn’t be correct? Further investigation revealed the issue to be a decimal point which had metamorphosed into a comma – the actual number of cans is 9.804 billion.
It’s still a staggering amount of fizzy pop, but it seems a little more realistic.
– Yours, etc,
DERMOT HESLIN,
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