A trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money

Elon Musk is He is now officially the world’s first trillionaire. This is an enormous amount of wealth (and, by proxy, power) that a single individual can possess. Its magnitude – a thousand times more than a billion – is difficult to comprehend for those of us who are not among the 3,363 billionaires currently in our world. But let’s try to understand it anyway.

The most common comparison is time. If you count a million seconds, it will take 11 and a half days. One billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But it will take a trillion seconds 31,700 years old – To get to this point today, you would have to start counting in the Paleolithic Age, around the time Neanderthals became extinct.

What about distance? Let’s say you earn $1 million for every meter you walk. If you started in Times Square in New York City, you could make a billion dollars just walking down the street to the Museum of Modern Art. But to reach $1 trillion, you would have to walk 621 miles, or about 23 marathons in a row. According to Google Maps, this is the equivalent of walking from Times Square to Dayton, Ohio, and would take about nine and a half days to do so.

You can also visualize in terms of weight, as a US dollar bill weighs exactly one gram – a symmetry designed to make counting stacks of money easier. Thus, a $1 million bill weighs a metric ton (2,204 pounds), which is roughly the same as a small hatchback. A $1 trillion dollar bill would weigh the same as 5,000 of the largest blue whales the world has ever seen (they can reach 200 metric tons) stacked on top of each other.

The Wall Street Journal He has a great visualization if you want to see what this looks like in pennies. A million stacked pennies can reach a height of about one mile, or roughly four Empire State Buildings. But a trillion pennies would get to the moon and back twice.

You get the idea. This huge amount of money can do many things. One trillion dollars is more than enough to solve world hunger by 2030. According to the United Nationswhich estimates it would take $93 billion annually. This leaves Musk with $628 billion, which is enough to fund the project as well That $600 billion OpenAI They are expected to spend on computing by 2030, and still have enough change to be richer than 99.9999 percent of the world’s population.

If we divide $1 trillion by the total US population of 349 million people, each person will receive $2,865. Or, if you theoretically had the liquidity to put $1 trillion in a bank account at a standard interest rate of 4%, you would earn roughly $110 million. every day – Nearly enough to launch two Falcon 9 rockets.

Just remember: Next time someone tells you to count your money, Elon Musk won’t be able to do it for the rest of his life, even if he enlists his small army of sons to help.