“His figure is an academic projection rather than an official forecast.”
That caveat sits near the bottom of the Sinclair station story that put “$1 billion” back in American headlines on Tuesday and sent “grand theft auto vi economic impact” into Google’s fastest-rising US searches by Wednesday morning. The number has a source, a method and a date. None of the three supports it.
You have probably seen the claim: Grand Theft Auto VI launches on Thursday, November 19, and about 1.5 million Americans will call in sick, costing the economy $1 billion in a day. Here is where it comes from and what the multiplication actually says.
The Claim
Economist Jose Garcia Montalvo of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, quoted first by the Spanish site El Output, assumed roughly 1.5 million US workers take the day off and multiplied by an average annual output of about $70,000 per worker. Outlets repeating it describe the result as “a short-term productivity decline of about 2%” and “$1 billion.”
MercoPress traced the figure in August: it “has circulated within the sector’s digital ecosystem since last year and does not come from a published study,” and “no consultancy has published a full methodology.”
The Arithmetic
$70,000 a year over 260 working days is $269 a day. Multiply by 1.5 million absences and you get $404 million. To reach $1 billion on that basis you need 3.7 million people to stay home.
The “2%” does not survive either. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 163.2 million employed Americans in September. 1.5 million of them is 0.9 percent. Two percent would be 3.3 million.
So you can have the $1 billion or you can have the 1.5 million absentees. You cannot have both from the same calculation, and the people repeating the claim have been reporting both for a year.
What a Normal Thursday Already Costs
There is one more number worth knowing before you forward the headline. Americans miss work every day, in quantities that make launch day look small.
The BLS absence tables for 2025 show 3.2 percent of full-time workers absent in any given week, and a lost-worktime rate of 1.7 percent. Apply that rate to the 121.3 million full-time workers in the same table and roughly 2.1 million full-time worker-days vanish on an ordinary day, from flu, childcare, dentists and hangovers. The GTA estimate’s 1.5 million, if every one of them materializes, is less than one normal day’s absences stacked on top of a normal day.
We think the figure should be retired, and the outlets running it should show their multiplication. It is a professor’s napkin number that gained a dollar sign and a decimal point of false precision by being repeated, and it tells you nothing about the economy and a great deal about how a press release becomes a fact. Take-Two will post its own figures when the game ships. Those will be real.