> Why would you dumb down market cap to earnings?

The point is "Market cap is BS".

> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.

One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.

Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.

It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.